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.

Hogamus Higamus Part 2 - Sex & The Free Gift

As a follow-up to the last piece, here is a guest post from Bellita:

"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 and 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 . . . 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]. "

I will never forget the Muslim man who tried to pick me up (so to speak) for Islam. (If I ever share the whole of that story on this blog, I’ll play up the Game elements.) Perhaps the most memorable part of his practiced sales pitch were his parting words . . .

 “You know, I’m really glad I got to talk with you about this, because my reward will be great in heaven. Many beautiful women!“

Yes, he actually said that. But it was not all . . .

“You will have a great reward, too, if you become a Muslim. Many handsome men!”

*****Silent Scream of Terror*****

Every woman I have told this story to has cringed in sheer horror at the idea of being a sexual partner to countless men for all eternity. (That’s not Heaven; it’s hell.) Byron acknowledges this in his post, but says that if you reverse the sexes, you have a man’s idea of an “all-areas pass to the Hall of the Gods.”

Then he asks: If men and women are completely different when it comes to sexual hard wiring, then why is it women’s sexuality that has become the standard by which both sexes are judged? When that point sunk in, I started wondering how we got to this modern state of affairs.

The old Catholic view was pretty much the reverse–very down on female sexuality, warning that all women could be agents of the devil, including one’s own wife. It is the early Church that gives us the very first Marriage Strike in history, with men retreating to the deserts in record numbers or barricading themselves against the opposite sex in monasteries. The great theologian Origen of Alexandria even thought it reasonable to castrate himself. Say what you like about the “misogyny” of it all: these religious actions took for granted that male sexuality is after quantity rather than quality.

On the other hand, the post-Reformation (but not necessarily propter-Reformation) idea that everyone can achieve sexual virtue through marriage seems to be in desperate denial of the same fact. And its implication that a man can be “fixed” by being faithful to a single woman (a benign sort of social castration?) is a complete break with the ancient Christian tradition that there is just no fixing human nature until death.

Yet anyone who thinks the Christian view begins and ends with the bleakness of sin and death has never seen the way the light of ages looks, refracted through the stained glass of medieval thought. At no other time in history did both natural law and divine law get to sit side by side at the table of philosophy.

St. Thomas Aquinas himself, Patron of Philosophers, was very clear that there is actually no natural law against a man taking several wives . . . whereas there is a natural law against a woman having several husbands. The latter is wrong in a way the former is not because it creates a situation in which a child may never know who his real father is. But the child of a man with many wives can be certain of both his father and his mother. Natural law and biology hum along together very harmoniously.

But why do people assume that divine law is the discordant note? I don’t know what happened to philosophy after the Reformation for many to take that for granted today, but the sanity of the Middle Ages was better than that. It’s the reason we have an answer to the question of why in the world a man would keep to only one woman when he doesn’t actually have to–and I submit that this answer that only a Catholic could have come up with is absolutely universal in application.

Simply stated, the only reason for a man to have only one wife and to stay true to her all their lives would be his desire to give her his fidelity as a gift.

And it would be a gift because she could never repay it, even with the same. A woman’s faithfulness is an obligation for the reason stated above, but a man’s faithfulness isn’t. Marriage is just not a relationship between equals. But when it comes with that free gift from a husband, properly valued by a wife, it is also–to quote St. Thomas Aquinas–”the greatest of all friendships.”

Nature can explain a lot of things about sex, but only Christianity understands the free gift.

*

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.

_-*-_-*-_-*-_-*-_

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.

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

The Unknown History Of Misandry

Another website I've just discovered - an amazing treasure trove of historical newspaper cuttings, photos, documents all relating to The Unknown History Of Misandry .

It's very mysterious, just seems to have appeared on the net from nowhere about 3 months ago, yet already has so much up there. I have no knowledge of who it is has put it together but I can tell I'm going to be wading through it for quite some time.

www.unknownmisandry.blogspot.com

Sexism Busters

Just a quick one to plug a new site www.sexismbusters.org/, which you may have heard about on AVFM last night. Its creator, Tom Martin, is currently suing the London School Of Economics Gender Studies department for sex discrimination, which will be quite a landmark case, should he win. There's more background information at his site, which I recommend you check out. And donate if you are able, it's for a very good cause.

20th Century Notions Of Gender

Reading the latest, as always, superbly concise & thought-provoking post by The Damned Olde Man I was struck by how good an overview of the 20th century's conceptions of gender it is, how the pendulum swinging back & forth through the 1950's & 60's - the rabid anticommunism of the McCarthy era leading to rebellious youths embracing of Marxist theory a generation later - ended up with the widespread normalization of first Marxist then Feminist thought. By the mid-1980's feminism's bizarre conspiracy theory of history became that of society at large.

But the other thought that strikes me about this is that the pendulum has kept swinging & that seems to now have changed: The kind of discussion we are now having about these matters in the manosphere & increasingly in mainstream media simply couldn't have been had anywhere 25 years ago. I hadn't really noted it as that before - the turn of the century being the actual cut-off point of the hold of that ideology - but it seems to me right now that that is the case. Feminism is so 20th century.

That feels quite revelatory to me. I hope TDOM doesn't mind me reproducing so much of his piece here, out of context - I was going to just use a paragraph or two but it works much better as a whole. The full article can be found here.

*

I’ve often viewed feminism as neither left nor right by nature. Instead it is, as many feminists freely admit, a gender issue and there are members of both genders on either side of the political spectrum. 

I think early feminists adopted the leftist view as a matter of strategy and for recruitment purposes. The Marxist approach to economics was easily adaptable to cultural practices. All it took to draw in membership was to convince people that women are disadvantaged. With societal structures predominantly populated with men, this was easy enough to do. The term “patriarchy” was redefined and used for this purpose. first wave feminists laid the groundwork and second wave feminists became the foot soldiers.

Aligning themselves with cultural Marxist idealism served another purpose as well. The communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era resulted in a popularization of Marxism during which time, it became chic to be openly Marxist and difficult, if not destructive, for opponents of Marxism to speak out against them; the fear of being identified as a “hatemonger” keeping opponents in line.

At first, feminism was only a part of the liberal movement of the 60s but by the mid-80s it had eclipsed the movement itself and liberalism had become more or less synonymous with feminism to the point that one could not be leftist and not be feminist.

On the right, the movement was more subtle. Women were already being pedestalized by white knight chivalry as standard practice. The leftist acceptance of the women as victim model was simply transferred to the right. One did not have to adopt the value system to accept the model. In fact, on the right women were already seen as helpless. All that was needed was to turn “helpless” into “victim.” The second wave feminist could fight the battles and the conservative feminist would move out of the way and then reap the rewards.

The chivalrist ideal was prevalent on the left as well. For more liberal chivalrists it was easy to accept feminists because of their Marxist position. They simply incorporated feminism into their own leftist idealism and became collaborationists (manginas as they are sometimes called). The right wing chivalrist (the white knight) picked up on the woman as victim mantra and rushed to her rescue.

Feminism transcends left and right. It is neither and it is both. It favors wealth and cultural redistribution from male to female while seeking to establish a totalitarian police state to control the “oppressor class.” To that end it has abandoned the liberal ideal of personal freedom and liberty for all, in favor of personal freedom and liberty for the new feminist oppressor class while restricting liberty and freedom for the new oppressed class (male). It seeks to replace what it calls patriarchy with matriarchy (which can now be equated with female supremacism). Thus while claiming to hold the liberal ideal of “equality” feminism has in reality adopted the conservative ideal of a ruling class superior to that of the working class and with more rights and privilege and the full force of the state to enforce that privilege.

Men Are From Mars. Women Are From Venus. Sun-Ra Was From Saturn.

As a follow-up to the last post, a recent article in New Scientist by Laura Spinney caught my eye. Called Mars and Venus Collide it took a look at the current state of play in regards to biological differences between men & women. In my opinion it tried to play it too safe in regard to the Nature/Nurture debate to really have much of a position at all but here's a couple of extracts I found of interest:

Why do girls prefer dolls and boys cars? Some put it down to cultural influences that prepare children to take on stereotypical gender roles as adults. Now consider this: male vervet monkeys prefer cars even though they have never been primed to do so (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 23, p467), and girls who have a hormonal disorder that means they produce too much testosterone prefer them, too. This suggests an innate component to toy choice, which may be amplified by socialisation processes after birth.

Intriguing new research by Margaret McCarthy at the University of Maryland in College Park points - to the neurobiology underlying sex-specific play preferences - in rats, at least. Her group found that the amygdalae, twin brain structures that are important for processing emotional and social cues, contain between 30 and 5O per cent more of a type of brain cell called glial cells in female rats than in males. Male brains, meanwhile, had higher levels of endocannabinoids - naturally occurring molecules that stimulate the same neural circuits as the active ingredient in cannabis. However, when the researchers injected day-old female rats with a dose of a cannabis-like substance, they found that after three days the proportion of glial cells in their amygdalae was the same level as in males. These females now played like male pups too - they played 30 to 40 per cent more than regular females, and indulged in much more rough-and-tumble play (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 107, p 20535). The main structural differences between male and female rat brains all have parallels in humans, and researchers believe that all mammals have the same neural mechanisms underlying key survival behaviours.

*

For years, the accepted view was that all embryos start out the same - the default sex being female. Then during the first trimester, in individuals that have inherited a Y chromosone, a gene called sry, for sex-determining region Y, switches on the development of the testes. These start pumping out testosterone and by the time a baby boy is born, the "default" female brain has become masculine.

We now know that's not quite how it works. As it turns out there are "pro-female" as well as "pro-male" genes, and that sexual differentiation is governed by a delicate balance between the two. In 2006, for example, Pietro Parma at the University of Pavia in Italy, and colleagues, reported that a gene called r-spondin1 promotes the development of the ovaries, and that without it individuals who are genetically female grow up physically and psychologically male, although they have ambiguous external genitalia and are sterile (Nature Genetics, Vol 38, p 1304).

*

There are clear differences in the types of mental illness and learning difficulties that males and females experience. Boys are much more vulnerable to developmental difficulties than girls. For example, boys are between six and 10 times more likely to be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, four times as likely to be affected by language disorders such as dyslexia, and a conservative estimate suggests that boys are twice as likely to suffer from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The picture is more chequered for adults, but the differences are still dramatic. Major depression is twice as common in women, while men are more susceptible to alchohol dependence and antisocial personality disorder. Even in conditions for which the prevalence is the same in both sexes, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, there are differences in age of onset and symptoms.

Melissa Hines, who studies gender development at the University of Cambridge, reckons sex differences in such conditions are the result of different vulnerabilities due to the distinct ways in which those brains are wired. We know, for example, that the amygdalae, a pair of brain structures important for processing emotions such as fear and aggression, are bigger in men, while the hippocampi, critical for memory, are bigger in women. Such brain differences are shaped by a combination of genes, hormones and the environment. "It's all of these things together that make the final outcome." says Hines.

-------------------------------------

As for Sun Ra , he doesn't have very much to do with this post at all. But the Mars/Venus thing always makes me think of him. And he did come from Saturn. Here's my favourite tune by him, anyway: