We have seen in the previous blog post of this series that selfishness and greed are direct consequences of the invention of owning and date back to the time when humans invented agriculture and changed their lifestyle from nomadic to settled. But what about evil which is not rooted in greed or the desire to own things or money? What about our sexuality? Is the prevalence of rape and sexual abuse not clear proof that there is something deeply wrong with us humans? Something which needs to be controlled and restrained at any cost?
The narrative of our evil sexuality is actually erroneous. But unfortunately it is also very easy to perpetuate. The reason is, as we will see, a shared misinterpretation of our early experience of sexuality in childhood.
Why does this matter? I think the subject is of great importance. Our shared perception of humans as flawed and potentially dangerous is the main reason why we cannot imagine a world without laws, moral and manners anymore. Why we all agree on the need for all of us to be put in chains. Why we love to follow „strong men“ (i.e. dictators) who promise to control the evil in us (and our perceived adversaries). For our all greater good.
So let’s reflect how we came to this sad view of ourselves:
At some point in our lives, typically during the early teenage years, we sense the first feelings of sexual desire in us. And we soon realize that these feelings are somehow connected to things we consider as evil and forbidden. We might find fantasies of forcing, controlling or even inflicting pain in ourselves. These fantasies can be very disturbing, even if we imagine ourselves „only“ as the victims. We also discover the strange feeling of shame. That we should not talk about these feelings to anybody. Not even our parents.
It seems to be obvious that we feel shame because our sexual desires are evil and must therefore be hidden from others to avoid punishment or social rejection. But this explanation is as obvious (and therefore perpetuated in almost all cultures over centuries) as it is false.
Let me first explain the phenomenon of shame.
Imagine the following situation. You are a good chess player and you want to find another player who plays really well too. The only way to be sure that a player plays well is to actually play a game against him. If you loose the game, you have finally found a better player than you are. Before you start the game you would not explain the way you like to play (and are going to play). You would carefully hide your preferred strategies to make it as difficult as possible for the other player to win.
For the same reason humans have a deeply rooted reluctance to reveal their sexual desires. It is because they are strategies. But there is absolutely nothing wrong or evil about them! It even turns out that these fantasies we are so ashamed of are actually someone else’s erotic dream. That the sexes actually fit very well together. And the only reason we instinctively hide them is to make it difficult to match them.
But what about the content of our fantasies? The aggression, the controlling, the pain? Why do we enjoy to do these things to others (or enjoy having them done to us by others)?
To understand this, we have to analyze this game we are playing. It's not, like chess, a game we hope to win. It is actually a game we hope to lose. In each sexual encounter both sexes actually hope to lose against the other. This is even the case when the power dynamics look very asymmetrical (like in BDSM). We are all always looking for a partner which is stronger than us. If we encounter a weaker „player“ and we win, we are actually disappointed. It means that our quest for a worthy opponent has still not come to an end.
Why are we so desperately looking for a strong partner? Because he must help us with a special task which is extremely difficult to accomplish alone: he must help us to self destruct slowly and painfully. And not only one partner, but ideally both do this to each other simultaneously.
But if both partners lose, who is the winner? The winner is - of course - the child. Our only possibility to defeat mortality.
The creation of a child is a task which requires enormous amounts of energy from both parents. It is not easy for us to provide this energy voluntarily. Doing so often goes against our strongest instinct: self preservation.
Therefore we need our partner to help us self destruct. „Self destruct“ in the sense of letting somebody use our physical and mental resources with our deepest consent (but maybe not always with our superficial consent). To help us fulfill our deepest wish: to create a new, strong life.
But today most men believe that women should entertain them superficially. And the same can be said about women and their expectations towards men. But this is a severe misunderstanding. Instead, both sexes are designed by evolution to squeeze out the maximum amount of energy from their partner for the benefit of their children. And there is nothing wrong with this. A male spider enjoys to be eaten after sex. To become the first food for his children. There is, for both sexes (!), a deep, in a way masochistic feeling of pleasure associated with getting artfully (!) used up over the years in the process of raising kids. This sounds grim, but many of us already know that it's actually really great fun.
So for a man, the true pleasure is not his wife cooking food for him. But rather to see her give the best pieces to her/his/their kid and supporting his work every day to help him to buy quality food more often. Taking care of her partner is only an instrumental goal required to secure resources for the children. A woman who gets these priorities right is a good woman, the kind of woman men desire most. And for a woman: a man who is willing to put her body into pain is a good man, because this is what giving birth to children means. A good man is a man, who is able and willing to convert everything she is, from her body to her knowledge to her humor and creativity, mercilessly into beautiful children.
Ultimately we are looking for someone who is strong enough to coerce us into deep happiness. Which is then - of course - a very blissful kind of coercion.
Not being aware of this is the source of so many tensions and confusions between the sexes. Our disappointment of being denied the superficial entertainment and affection we crave (and at the same time being unable to appreciate the offer to fulfill much deeper desires) is deeply infantile.
So if you are a man: yes, most women want to become mothers. But not your mother. They are beings ultimately designed to take optimally care of the only thing on this planet you will ever love more than yourself. So if you hate women because they fail or refuse to love you in the same way your mother does, you don’t understand. You don’t understand what you really want.
But we seek the so called „evil“ in the other sex not only because we subconsciously hope that it will be used against us. We also hope to pass on superior socio-sexual skills to our offspring. To create skilled daughters and sons who will one day manage to get defeated by even more skilled men and women. Yes, our sexual strategies are somehow like weapons. They implement attack and defense and again means to neutralize the defense. Each strategy has its counter strategy and these again have counter counter strategies. And so on. The battlefield of the sexes has, over millions of years, led to extremely complex behavior patterns.
So if you are a woman: in the bedroom, where you cook your „very best dish“ for him: does it make you happy if he just dips a finger in your food and makes a sceptical „hm…., maybe I get something better tomorrow“ face after tasting? I know, probably you like it when he asks politely for the serving. But isn’t it also very exciting if he gets so terribly greedy for your „perfect meal“ that he forgets all manners and just serves himself a huge portion?
But are such preferences the reason, why we see all the rape and abuse today? No, the reason for this is the current state of society and (fortunately) not our nature. In our distant past - before the invention of agriculture - women could make full use of their highly developed socio-sexual skills. They were by no means weak and could not be easily defeated by simple use of force. And, even more importantly, men were also not interested in weak women as they were self confident and there was an abundance of much more attractive strong women.
How is the situation today? We have heavily crippled and suppressed female sexuality in order to make women easier to control. This is a direct consequence of monogamy which was required to allow the inheritance of land. Maybe it was also an attempt to stabilize society by distributing women „fairly“ (every man gets exactly one woman assigned). But while this strategy might be technically successful (in the sense of enabling long term military dominance over other cultures) it is a disaster for sexual satisfaction. While the reproductive potential women represent can indeed be distributed among men in the same way rice bags can be distributed, female desire does not follow this logic. Desire is an immaterial good which can be created out of nothing but can also easily disappear completely. And this exactly what happened to a large extent and led to the current sexual starvation of both men and women. Of course in this sad setup men can still get - to some minimal extent - what they want. But, as it does only require some physical force instead of a challenging interaction, socio-sexual skills are not required for men anymore.
And this is where we are today. Men with low self confidence and almost no skills rarely having poor sex (or worse: rape) with weak, crippled women.
It is not surprising we have become so obsessed with winning over the weak: it has become almost impossible to enjoy the far greater pleasure of losing against the strong. The strong have become almost extinct, moral has wiped them out. So today we have all these adult men grooming very young girls in online chats. Women using dates only as a means to get free dinners and some compliments (and still without child at 40). Men using an endless sequence of tinder dates for stale one-night stands. Dozens of neighboring men raping a sedated old woman together over years and even a surgeon abusing hundreds of his narcotized underage patients.
We got so much used to play the game only on level one, endlessly opening lootboxes and collecting game items and coins. And we even believe this is great fun and totally worth the effort.
Sadly, it’s all we know. We have become mostly unaware of our true dream: to fight the end boss on level 15 and finally, finally lose!
But the last true „end bosses“ of both sexes probably died thousands of years ago. And if one of them reveals herself (for instance) in our society, like a defrosted mammoth from a distant past, we are scared, call her a whore and despise her.
Evil is modesty. Involuntary modesty (out of ignorance) or intentional modesty (out of resignation).
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