I visited the infamous Herbertstrasse in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg two times in my life (sort of). The second time was in February 2024 on a business trip. The Herbertstrasse is, as an area reserved for prostitution, a no go zone for women. Women are in fact not allowed to enter by law. We were there in a mixed group of men and women and the women had to wait at the entrance for the time we went to have a look at the place. It was rather cold and rainy on this day, so we had little time (we did not want to make the women wait for us too long). But it was long enough to confirm that the women there are really pretty and indeed almost naked.
My first visit to the Herberstrasse happened many years before and was much more interesting. My recent second visit is only important because it made me remember my first „visit“ (and write this blog post now).
When I was around ten (therefore approximately in the year 1979) information about sexuality was not readily available yet. The internet did not exist yet and society was still puritan. All the relevant material was strictly kept away from kids. So I felt extremely lucky when my parents brought a copy of the Stern magazine home (it could have also been the Spiegel, I‘m not sure anymore) which contained an article about Domenica Niehoff the famous prostitute working at Herbertstrasse. In this interview Domenica answered in great detail questions about all the sexual practices her clients requested. I learned, with great surprise, slight disgust but also quite a bit of fascination about blow jobs and titty fucks and the like. One particular sentence I never forgot: she described how some clients wanted her to wear school girl clothes and to behave like a young girl during sex. She said something like „they probably would love to fuck their own young teenage daughters, but as this is forbidden they come to me instead“. I was really shocked after reading this. These men must have a really evil character!
In the coming years I thought about this sentence several times. And, as I learned more about life and humans, my doubts regarding Domenica‘s interpretation grew. Why did these men choose Domenica who was considerably older at the time than other prostitutes in the area. Why not a sex worker just above legal age which could be a much better substitute for a real teenage girl? And at the time, there was even a well known market for very young prostitutes: the teenage drug addicts from the „Babystrich“ (where women charged probably even much less for their services than Domenica!). And most puzzling: Domenica was famous for her huge breasts and had therefore visually very little in common with a teenage girl.
Therefore the updated explanation for the events was now the following: some men must be so moral, that they are willing to accept a woman who was much older than what they actually desired and were even willing to pay a hefty premium compared to the „real thing“. And all these spendings and compromises just to be a „good man“ (at least a bit).
No, of course we all (except the most naive) know: this makes only very little sense!
But there is another explanation which actually fits the observations quite well. But to be able to understand the second version we have to dive a bit deeper into the mechanics of sex:
Why do many men have a preference for young women? This can be easily understood with an example from the animal world: wolves find tender meat from young prey animals tastier than the meat from older animals. The reason ist not that tender meat contains more nutrients or is of higher quality. The reason why the wolf’s reward model is designed like this is to influence his hunting strategy. Hunting a young animal is in most cases much more likely to be successful than hunting a strong adult animal. The expectation value of the hunting success for the hunt for the young animal is higher which needs to be reflected in the hunting strategy. It would be difficult and too time consuming for a wolf to figure out such statistical insights by himself. This is why it is implemented (by evolution) in his brain‘s reward model already at birth time. Wolves prefer very quickly to hunt the young animals over the adult ones, which is the correct strategy.
It therefore seems logical to assume that men prefer young women for a similar reason: they are weak adversaries! They might be easily tricked into offering sex for little resources (or care) and chances of success are higher. They are therefore a preferred target for seduction attempts and as the average success is higher, men are willing to invest more energy into these attempts (e.g. offering more resources to the woman).
Of course women developed, over millions of years, many effective counter measures against this male strategy: for instance they try to appear younger than they actually are. This tricks men into providing more resources than what would be actually optimal considering the true age of the woman.
As this is a very powerful strategy to fool men, some men have developed a subconscious preference for women who are particularly good at it.
Now things suddenly make much more sense: Domenica‘s „special“ customers were not pedophiles but actually men who adore skilled pedophile exploiters. This is quite a difference to the original assumption! They subconsciously want to pass on this skill to the daughters they (also subconsciously) hoped to procreate with Domenica. Of course the skill can be only effectively used by women up to a certain (rather low) age. But as it can be demonstrated by a woman at any age, it makes absolutely sense to desire an older woman in a schoolgirl dress for these men. Therefore this sexual preference is by no means ridiculous but an effective strategy! The targeted woman is not supposed to use the strategy but only to pass her superior skills on to her daughters (both by inheritance of genes and education). These men were in fact (unconscious) early feminists (sort of)!
Now the topic becomes a lot more interesting and I think it is worth to dig a bit deeper.
I believe that in sexual play we actually explore the sexual capabilities of our partners. With capabilities I mean the sophistication of the strategies they master. These can be simple strategies or counter strategies or even counter strategies to counter strategies to counter strategies. And the funny thing is: we actually hope to lose (!) in this game of sexual play. Only then we feel that we have a skilled enough partner worth our breeding efforts. Ideally we find a partner who is stronger than we are. We could also say that in sexual play we try to determine the move depth (in German: "Zugtiefe") of our partner. Let‘s use a simple metaphor: if you want to have a child which is a really good chess player, you have to play chess with a few people. As soon as you lose a game very clearly you might have found a good partner to make the child. And to be good in chess you need to be able to think some moves ahead of your adversary. And playing chess is great fun, even if you never get to kill a real king or a queen.
The mentioned „hoping to lose“ and the fact that we enjoy it so much (especially when we are losing!) makes the fierce battle of sexual play appear like an activity based on compassion. Fortunately.
Therefore we prefer partners who implement higher order strategies. A woman who has a counter measure against our own counter measure is preferrable to a woman who becomes victim of our counter measure (because the daughters from the second woman will be probably equally weak „players“).
This is now the reason why men pay a lot of money for sex with women who demonstrate such strategies with skill. They have a very high value and are (unfortunately, as we will see soon) only very rarely available these days.
Of course the „game“ of sexuality is millions of years old. Therefore almost all women (and men) implement very complex strategies (and corresponding counter strategies etc. etc.). But, and this is important: because we barely understand the nature of our sexuality, we have developed a moral which - for arbitrary historical reasons - forbids many activities in sexual play: most people are - for example - still disgusted from the thought of a man asking his wife to dress like a school girl in bed.
Today, we (and especially women) are mostly forbidden to reveal our sexual strategies (but of course we all have them).
But for this moral, which was ironically created out of the intention to contain evil, society might have to pay a very high price:
Let's first analyze the situation in the case of weak moral (i.e. people can apply their sexual strategies): The existence of all these many counter strategies makes a simple direct exploitation difficult. There are, for instance, only few true pedophiles. The reason for this is that this simple strategy has become mostly ineffective over time. Women have developed strong counter measures against it a long time ago. In fact the whole „gender war“ (I allow myself to redefine the term a bit) has - over millions of years - become so mind bogglingly complex that exploitation is only rarely possible. One has to be very „lucky“ nowadays to score with a simple trick. We are therefore mostly busy passing on all these fancy advanced strategies to our children (maybe they might get the opportunity to really use them).
And this is a good thing! Instead of enjoying harming others („killing kings“ in the chess analogy) we enjoy a whole lot of games which are designed to create offspring which is capable of harming (corresponding to „playing chess“). And as our offspring will most likely do exactly the same, people get actually only harmed very rarely.
What happens now if we suppress these games in sexual play (for instance by promoting some restrictive sexual moral or even enforcing laws forbidding certain sexual practices)? Humans prefer partners which are masters of complex higher order strategies. But if they are nowhere available, we have to content ourselves with what’s on offer. This means that we have to go for the simple direct strategies (like the exploitation of young age in the case of men).
These strategies even become effective again: in a world full of simple sheep it is best to be a pure wolf. But this behavior cannot be really satisfying for us anymore. Explained in the chess analogy: if you play chess against a player who does not even know the rules of the game, the shortest way to (a boring) victory is to remove the other player's king in the first move. Such a victory is also sad, because of course you know that you did not win against a chess master but only against an idiot. And back to sex: who wants an idiot to become the father/mother of his/her children?
If a man has to choose between two women, one young (and consequently without skills) and an older one (who is not allowed to express her skills and therefore appears equally unskilled) he will unavoidably choose the younger one, because he will be at least be able to apply the most simple strategy.
So if we remove the so called „pervert“ from our sexuality (as we did) we actually create a world full of sexual violence (as we have now). Of child abuse instead of the games discussed above. Of cruel rape and domestic violence instead of partners playing happily around with the complexities of domination and submission [1]. Of prostitution and sexual frustration instead of happy couples. Of boring obsession with youth and wealth [2].
Instead of making progress and becoming civilized, we travel back in time to the dark ages when such primitive strategies were promising.
The civilized is the complex, the sophisticated culture developed over long time periods. It is not the raw, the cruel and the simple. Therefore, what we call „pervert“ now is actually the truly civilized (and not the allegedly civilized „moral“ which is the reason for our current misery).
I believe that learning about our sexuality on the basis of evolution and game theory has the potential to dwarf our current discussions on this topic to an obsolete grain of dust (while letting us having lots of fun in the process).
[1] „Some couples get a lot of fun out of extended struggles, premeditated or impromptu“ (from „The Joy of Sex“ by Dr. Alex Comfort, 1972). Famous advice for a whole generation, but probably not very compatible with the current trend.
[2] Also a very basic strategy often employed by women
Animated GIF „Sexuality“ by GUM
Image on top: © Author 2024
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