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.

Higamus Hogamus (Part 3)

In the first of these anthropological lectures on 21st century homo sapiens mating behaviour I spent a lot of time speaking about male sexuality, so this one I'll try focus more on the female side of the mountain, the innate female characteristics we need to factor in when speaking of male/female relationships & our present morality.

Human females are biologically structured for monogamous pairings, at least for the short term - what has been called 'serial monogamy': perhaps in reality four or five years. This is most likely due to the unusually slow development of human young; Monogamy, after all, is extremely rare in the rest of the animal kingdom, with the exception of a number of species of birds. And there it exists for a similar reason: there are eggs needing sitting on & waiting to be done until they hatch. The male must go forth & find food while the female sits at home & feathers her nest. In the human world, infants are helpless for years, rather than a few days or weeks, as it is with most other animals. But by around the fourth year the child can fend for itself a little more & the woman has more freedom of movement, she can work again & go about her life without nursing her child constantly. Then that urge can safely leave, once her & her child's survival is no longer threatened.

But women are also hypergamous, meaning they are usually looking for a mate of equal or higher status, be that socially, financially, physically (strength or attractiveness) or intellectually. One way or another, most women will not 'marry down'.

Biologically, this makes a lot of sense. For all of human history, at least up until the advent of the pill in the 1960's, sex for women would inevitably mean pregnancy, sooner or later. And pregnancy meant, at best, a new life you had to support for the next 16 years or so. At worst, death. That is a serious price attatched to pleasure, & under such harsh realities, it makes sense for women to vet their partners far more thoroughly than men, to find one who's going to stick around & provide for them in some way.

And so it is that when women find another lover it is more often the case that they are testing the water for a new relationship, for a better model, for someone they like better than the one they are with.

The males of the species are very different in this regard. Once they find someone they like very much & want to settle down with, they still want to go out & sow their seed far & wide, with almost anyone they can, even if they're not hoping to plant anything. Rarely are they looking for 'someone better' in doing this. They're simply doing what their bodies & nature are instructing them to do. To a man, love & sex are quite clearly two distinct entities. Women seem to have a harder time seeing a sexual relationship as being just that, & are much more likely to project a narrative on top, an expectation of something more, a longer story of greater commitment.

One of the authors of that fascinating analysis of male/female internet usage, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, had this to say about the differing requirements of men & women:

"All across the planet, what most women seek out, in growing numbers, are not explicit scenes of sexual activity but character-driven stories of romantic relationships.

Men who are attracted to a particular actress may go online looking for racy photos of her. Women who are attracted to an actor are more likely to seek out personal details about his life or erotic stories featuring one of the characters he portrays.

All romance novels, whether written by the likes of Jane Austen, Nora Roberts or Stephenie Meyer, employ a narrative formula that follows the gradual elucidation of the hero's inner character, leading to an emotional epiphany between hero and heroine. On this journey, the heroine—and the reader—investigates the character of the hero. The goal of a romance novel's heroine is never sex for its own sake, much less impersonal sex with strangers. All romance novels end with a "happily ever after": a marriage or committed long-term partnership".  

Women's romantic & sexual fantasies are not interchangeable with men's: if we reverse the genders of the Cinderella/Pretty Woman fantasy - the formula of perhaps most romantic fiction - we see it quickly falls apart & becomes nonsensical: A poor boy sits & waits for a rich woman to come along to save him from his poverty? A grey-haired businesswoman picks up a syphillitic rent-boy & promises to provide for all his needs, keeping him in pampered luxury until the day he dies? Who would go see that film? There's nothing in it for most women, & men would find it repulsive & emasculating. Such events may well have taken place in real life at some point, for all I know, but that's not the point: No-one, male or female, dreams of that story as their greatest fantasy. No-one thinks that being in that film is the best their life can turn out.

*

When I started looking into all this - men, women, monogamy, hypergamy.. I checked out, for the first time, the prevalance of polygamy in the modern world. I had expected to find, going in, that polygamy (or 'polygyny') had pretty much died out on the world stage, due to Christianity & the imposition of western culture upon the rest of the globe. But according to Wikipedia, & the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook it quotes from,  

"of 1,231 societies noted, 186 were monogamous. 453 had occasional polygyny, 588 had more frequent polygyny, and 4 had polyandry.^"

All of which is considerably more than I would have imagined. Polygamy as an institution is extremely foreign to our culture, yet objectively it is important to accept that people living polygamously are no more or less moral than people in monogamous relationships. People born into polygamous cultures are no more inherently 'bad' than people born into Christian cultures are 'bad' because they're not born Muslim. It seems a common weakness in the human mind to not be able to think outside whatever cultural goldfish bowl we are born into for more than a few minutes at a time.

Monogamy is not natural, & men, being naturally polygamous, struggle under it particularly. But I find it odd how polygamy is often presented as some kind of male oppression of women, when in actual fact it is 'men' (as a group) who lose out the most in a polygamous society. For those for whom this is not immediately obvious, let's break it down:

Say there are a hundred people, 50 men & 50 women - the population of the world in miniature - Now say 5 of the men at the top of the social hierarchy are wealthy & powerful or popular enough to attract & comfortably support multiple partners, so each of them takes 5 wives apiece. For the women this works out well, as, after all,  these are the attractive men, & in a monogamous society they would otherwise have to compete with each other to get to them & only one of them could succeed.

But now here's the situation: now there are 45 men left but only 25 women: half the women are gone. The 25 left may marry 25 of the remaining men, leaving all the women comfortably settled, but still that leaves 20 of the men with no-one at all.


In addition to this, if men are to have multiple partners, where are they going to find them, except from the pool of already attatched women, women with lovers & husbands already? It is here the private spills over into the public & creates societal problems - disharmony & anger between men, & also between women, families, & society as a whole. As a man it means you can't trust your friends. As a woman it weakens what security & hold you feel you have in your relationship. As a society, it means you are no longer pulling together but instead looking out only for your own interests. Without a shared sexual morality practiced by a majority, no society can hold together long.

This is the crux of the problem: there has to be a certain amount of societal disapproval to promiscuity so that civilization doesn't break down altogether. But, at the same time, nature must find its way.

The answer, such as it is, that our present society + human nature seem to have thrashed out between them is that the men who can - i.e. the wealthy, powerful or unusually attractive men - do stray, but keep it hidden. As wikipedia puts it:

While few present-day states permit polygamous marriages, polygynous male behavior may be observed in the establishment of mistresses, who are openly or secretly supported. In this way, men may be technically monogamous but de facto polygynous.

 

This is problematic, because clearly not all men can do this, & ends up creating a situation of imbalance, of haves & have nots. It is also morally troubling, as it invariably involves lying ('cheating'), at least under the present order. But plainly many men accept this as a necessity. Most women, after all, react badly to the idea of their man being with other women, even if they may benefit from it by it keeping their relationship together. But another way of looking at the situation would be that men are forced into 'adultery' by the peculiar morality of their times, which ignores or condemns the natural biological reality of their sex.

The prudery of the Christian era - in particularly the Victorian period - never really ended but carried over into the present feminist age. The only real difference being, where the Christian Church demonized all sexuality, feminism demonizes & condemns only male sexuality, depicting it almost exclusively as some sort of ugly, violent threat.

But here's the thing:

Sex is life. Without male desire for womankind, none of us would be here. In a healthy society male desire would be something honoured & praised. But instead of being raised up & admired, male virility is shamed & frowned upon unless it is played out within a narrow band of acceptable behaviour: "we want you to be a wild, free, sexual stallion, preselected, admired & desired by other women, driven to be successful but only with us (monogamously, of course)".

Now, those two things don't go together: a highly sexual, driven, virile man will rarely be truly monogamous, & if he tries to be - or is forced to be - he will become less virile & so less attractive to the woman he is trying to be faithful to. An alpha male is seldom monogamous. Perhaps a few beta males are, but women don't want beta males. Women don't have posters of beta males on their bedroom walls.


Einstein, Roosevelt, JFK, MLK, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Gandhi, Picasso, Nietzsche, William Blake, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence... the list is only limited by how much we know of great men's intimate lives. All these were either believers in polygamy or adulterers. If our best minds, our highest achievers the past hundred years or so are all just a bunch of dirty lowdown pussyhounds, what hope do the rest of us have?

Would a more sensible approach not be to simply accept that as part of male nature? Would it not be more sensible for us to expect that behaviour from most men, & accept it as part & parcel of the whole package?




There's still a little more to say on this: One more post & that''ll be it.

An Introduction To Hypergamy

There's a piece I've been writing, about some of the differences between women & men which is taking me awhile to finish. Luckily a portion of what it is I'm attempting to say was covered quite excellently by last night's AVFM radio, an extract of which I'm posting here as a stop gap before my next one: Full show available at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/avoiceformen

Hypergamy: The Husband Store

A store that sells husbands has just opened where a woman may go to choose a husband from among many men. There is, however, a catch. As you open the door to any floor you may choose a man from that floor, but if you go up a floor, you cannot go back down except to exit the building.

So a woman goes to the shopping center to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 - These men have jobs.
The woman reads the sign and says to herself, "Well, that's better than my last boyfriend, but I wonder what's further up?"

So up she goes.

The second floor sign reads:

Floor 2 - These men have jobs and love kids.
The woman remarks to herself, "That's great, but I wonder what's further up?" And up she goes again.

The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love kids and are extremely good looking. 
"Hmm, better" she says. "But I wonder what's upstairs?"

The fourth floor sign reads:

Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking and help with the housework. 
"Wow!" exclaims the woman, "very tempting. BUT, there must be more further up!" And again she heads up
another flight.

The fifth floor sign reads:

Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking, help with the housework and have a strong romantic streak.
"Oh, mercy me! But just think... what must be awaiting me further on?" So up to
the sixth floor she goes.

The sixth floor sign reads:

Floor 6 - You are visitor 3,456,789,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at The Husband Store and have a nice day.