WARNING: This blog post is going to be a long and wild ride. Not exactly stuff for the faint of heart!
In an earlier blog post I have written about the insight from experiments in game theory, that our fascination for violence is actually required to keep violence at bay in our society.
I want to explore this argument a bit further and start with a bit of military strategy.
1. Wars in dynamic equilibrium
Imagine the following two different situations in which a pair of competing countries could be:
- Both countries carry out military maneuvers together often. Therefore both armies are getting updated and improved regularly and accordingly none of them has significant weaknesses. This means that the leaders of both countries know that the potential gains of a war are very small but the expected damage high. As a result, a war between these countries is extremely unlikely. But both armies become increasingly complex and sophisticated over time.
- In the second situation, both countries start with armies of comparable material strength and training level. But they never perform maneuvers together and one of the countries has the firm belief that they have the stronger army now, but will not be able to keep their army updated as well as the other country. Accordingly, immediate attack is the only rational decision for this country.
Most military strategists believe that maneuvers alone are not sufficient to generate the required insights to keep an army at a state of the art level. Analysis of real conflicts between other countries is essential and often those countries have the strongest armies, which regularly engage in small scale conflicts themselves.
An example of a war like competition where this effect also plays is the economic competition between companies. In this case the „battle“ is raging so permanently, that the players are usually of almost equal strength. The tiny differences in strength mean that significant redistributions in the turnover of competitors often take a lot of time. And because of this, the „war“ is never perceived as such, even if its intensity is high.
This is only an important intermediate result which will be needed later.
But now, have to make a huge jump (sorry)…
2. The reproductive instinct as a human motor and the natural power imbalance between women and men
All the important things happening on the living earth are in one way or another driven by the core motor of biology: the desire of all living beings to reproduce, to defeat death.
It’s - of course - also the driver behind human behavior (apart from self preservation). And it’s - at least according to my assumption - also the root driver behind most problems human society has today.
We all know that the corresponding capabilities of men and women are very different. Men possess only a blueprint (in the form of genes) for a child while women have a blueprint and a factory (egg, womb etc.) to produce it.
The difference in opportunity is enormous. And I want to illustrate it with a small thought experiment:
Imagine a woman who is not pregnant, but has decided that she wants to be in expectation of a child tomorrow. All she has to do, is to visit the closest bar, find a guy who pays her a few drinks and - voilà - next morning she can wake up in the bed of the father of her child, which is already growing in her womb. I’m not saying this is the recommended way to get pregnant, but only that it could be done that easily.
Now imagine a man trying to do the same thing: going to the bar with the firm intent to be in the state of becoming a father tomorrow. Haha! Good luck (he would need a gazillion tons of it and it might still not be enough)!
This extreme difference in opportunity (which ultimately converts into a form of power) is extremely important if we want to understand human behavior. It leads, for instance, to a different perception of sexual desire of the two sexes:
- Man (brain soaked in testosterone): „Damn, I’m so hungry! I need to eat something right now!“
- Woman (brain soaked in estrogens): „Hm…..,today, I have so much taste for strawberries!“
This description is a bit cliché, as there are many properties which are shared between the sexes. But the general tendency goes like this.
But now it becomes clear why a man's life mostly revolves around finding the missing part: access to a „baby factory“. From buying fancy cars to conquering other people's land: most of what they do ultimately serves this purpose.
What happens now, if this goal can't be reached anymore? Or if they even only believe they cannot reach the goal (weaker but maybe with the same effect)?
3. The destruction of the rich pre-agricultural relationship between the sexes
I have also written about how the invention of agriculture and the subsequent culture of settlement and owning resources had a profound impact on human sexuality. Female sexual behavior was actually made obsolete in its entirety.
As women were not allowed by society to act out their complex sexuality, they lost - to a large extent - interest in sex. Society tried to invent cultural features to limit the damage as well as possible. To recycle the metaphor from above, parents tried to find a „strawberry farmer“ for the girl who loved strawberries so much. But unfortunately this doesn't work really well. Female sexuality is, for evolutionary and game theoretical reasons I will explain later, extremely complex. Therefore, if a woman is in the mood for strawberries today she might well be lusting for apples tomorrow.
The result was an enormous decline in female desire on a global scale (maybe with the exception of our always beautifully sinful Berlin). At some point in time the medical community was even convinced that women are incapable of experiencing lust.
This was not a problem for human reproduction, as infrequent intercourse is sufficient to impregnate women. But - unfortunately - actual reproduction (i.e. the number of children they have) is not the metric men use subconsciously to assess their success (i.e. needs to be on a high level to feel satified). In our distant past, they could never be sure which of the children were actually from them. The only way to make it at least likely to have many children was - of course - to have lots of sex. So for men, sex was always the goal [1]. And in the distant past, men got lots of sex, because women had 1000 different socio-sexual reasons for feeling the desire to engage in it.
Therefore the loss of female desire and the resulting drop in intercourse frequency (and quality!) left men heavily starving (even if the population was growing fast!). Also women are very bored. In the absence of the desired strawberries they simply refuse to „eat“ when offered only bread.
But why is female sexuality so complex?
4. Sexual behavior as a „war“ in dynamic equilibrium
Sexual intercourse is a war game (with a small pinch of war mixed in) between the sexes. It’s exactly the kind of war I described above which is never perceived as such, because it has been „raging“ with high intensity - but little damage - without interruption for millions of years.
Its purpose is to select competent partners. When we hear the word select in this context, we already know that it must be rather a female thing, and that men simply had to adapt to it, if they wanted to have chances with women.
Therefore, men and women enjoy - not unexpectedly - to play the same game. This is a well known fact from the statistics of porn sites and search engines: both sexes have similar preferences (at least regarding heterosexual content). „Female friendly“ porn is surprisingly only niche content.
But why is porn so full of male dominance, aggression and even outright violence against women (men appear in the victim role too, much less frequently)? And why do so many women get aroused by such content?
The reason for this is the large power asymmetry between the sexes described above: women subconsciously (!) want to ensure their future sons inherit the necessary skills to not get fooled by women too easily in their life.
Therefore, exactly because women are in a so much stronger position, it’s of huge importance for women to select a partner which is able to counter this strength. Women require men to demonstrate this strength during sexual play. This male strength consists of complex character traits and socio-sexual skills. And to allow women to understand them (equally for defense purposes and to assess men), evolution gave them the ability to experience an orgasm too (only females of intelligent species have this ability).
The „war“ of sex once worked very similar to the war of economy mentioned above: because it was happening continuously over millions of years, the strengths of men and women were in a (dynamic) equilibrium. Therefore severe sexual crimes were a rare event (unfortunately this has changed, more about this below). The dangers of sex were comparable to playing a chess game: apart from the ego of the losing player, nobody got hurt (and in sex, both men and women even enjoy to lose to some extent).
The almost complete suppression (almost to eradication in some countries) of female sexuality had major consequences:
5. The current age of sexual frustration, boredom and violence
- Women lost the power associated with their natural advantage (of being the only ones who could give birth to children) [2]. The reason for this is, that they lost the ability to understand (and use to their advantage) male sexuality.
- This led to an extreme power disparity (men over women) and made sexual crime (like rape in the marriage) suddenly effective (and consequently a sad daily reality in many countries).
- Women became a „tradable resource“ (by prostitution, but also marriage to some extent). Therefore today men need to acquire resources to be able to afford women.
- The total control of men over women made „learning to become a good lover“ obsolete for men. In many cultures men can get sex - albeit poor and sad sex - also without any such skills.
- With marriage, men were reduced to sex starved ATMs, only required for resource acquisition.
- As married women became practically owned, they were not allowed to remain sexually visible in society after marriage. This was also implemented with detailed clothing rules. This led to an unexpected problem which is still very visible in many countries (especially in Asia): if grown up women become sexually invisible, the only way adolescent men are getting in contact with uncensored femininity is in the form of teenage girls. This distorts male sexuality and leads to widespread fetishism („school girl uniform“). In some countries the only „solution“ people came up with, was to submit teenage girls to strict clothing rules too. But this - of course - aggravated the problem only further: the only „contact femininity“ consisted now of children and the sad - but unavoidable - result should not surprise anybody: rampant pedophilia and/or the „need“ to hide even very young girls from public view.
Women ultimately always prefer the attractive, great lover over the rich man (contrary to popular belief!). The rationale for this is, that the effect of good genes can last for thousands of generations while wealth often lasts only a few generations. And wealth is also an abstract concept which did not exist when our mind was shaped by evolution.
But in the absence of good lovers, wealth (which promises access to resources) becomes of course an important criterion.
Therefore, even in places where women could still freely choose their future husbands, sexual play became much more scarce.
6. Not much good comes from sexually frustrated men and powerless women
Of course this started a fierce battle between men over the most important resource which had become so rare. Men started to seek power (for instance in its universal form of money) to be able to get control over women or to be able to buy sex. One particularly pitiful guy even made tremendous efforts to become president of his country only to be able to „grab them by the p---y“.
We all know the result:
- Devastating, cruel wars everywhere
- Extreme overuse of natural resources
- Frequent rape of women and children
- Countless negative side effects of excessive male competition
And what can we do now? There is no simple answer, but I will attempt to provide some ideas anyway.
7. What can we do about it?
We must increase the frequency of sexual intercourse back to „normal“ (i.e. pre-agriculture) levels again. This is only possible, if we allow women to act out their natural sexuality. And this means we must abolish monogamy (I'm not sure about marriage, could be still fun also without monogamy). This is easier said than done. Our whole societies are built around this concept and if we only pull the plug on monogamy quickly, it would have many undesired side effects. Therefore we must adjust many knobs simultaneously.
Here a (subjective) selection of ideas:
- Women must learn not to give up good sex. Women becoming interested again in sex must become a global top priority topic. Sex should never be a duty. Sex being sold or bought for money should be considered an alarm signal. A sign for a disfunctional society and an indication of urgent need for action.
- Women (and men) must learn to embrace and celebrate every aspect of their sexuality. This makes women insist on good lovers and helps them to become good lovers themselves.
- We need to establish a new morality: imagine a woman who has quick sex with a rich guy once a month for money while her real boyfriend gets tons of far better fun for free. We should count such behavior as a laudable and exemplary. We should consider it a heroic act of subversion against the current system and people should cheer her (and her boyfriend too!) instead of blaming her and calling her a „slut“.
- It would help if we realized that shame is part of the human sexual strategy (and not at all a proof that our sexuality is evil!).
- We should also learn to accept and embrace sexual fantasies and desires of aggressive nature or otherwise „fishy“ nature. They are artefacts which can be explained well by game theory (evolution of the „tit-for-tat strategy“) and are even highly important in the sense that they maintain the power balance required to make sexual crime ineffective (remember the example at the beginning).
- Men should refuse to promise women to take care of their children exclusively. They should not get married if the primary purpose is exclusive child care! These are implementation details of monogamy.
- But men should - of course - take care of children (any!) as much as possible. Anything else would be also stupid, because they are so much fun. This is important, otherwise the point just above leads to disaster and women will be - legitimately - reluctant to abandon monogamy.
- Instead of teaching women judo to allow them to fight molesting men in a dark alley (as many see necessary today), women and men should learn again to enjoy to „fight“ each other in the bedroom (the kitchen will do fine too, but this is a detail). With as much aggression as desired by the lovers (but without any of the completely inappropriate hate!).
- The current scarcity of sex makes men afraid that they could get even less, if they lose control over women. But - of course - exactly the contrary is the case! The „sluttier“ (this word needs to change connotation!) we allow and encourage women to live, the more sex there will be for everybody. Female desire is not limited like oil or gold, it’s an immaterial good, it can therefore be „produced“ in infinite quantities.
In short:
- Men must learn to „let go“. They should losen their „firm grip“ on women step by step. Until it’s gone completely! They should realize that this is in their own best interest.
- Women should learn to let go too: they should realize that monogamy, often seen as required for economic protection, is not only depriving them of huge amounts of fun, but is also endangering the future of their children.
- In general: both men and women should just do more of what they enjoy and do less of what they believe to be their duties.
Should I really take all this serious? I’m unsure.
What do you think? Write me!
[1] While for men lots of sex was essential for reproductive success, it never was for women. Only a small fraction of the sex women have is required for reproduction. The vast majority of it is performed for other (subconscious!) reasons (preventing infanticide, social bonding, keeping men around to care for children, access to food, social status,....).
[2] Interestingly it must have been women who started this process. Only they had an interest in it and only they had the social power required to implement it.
Image Credit: Collage by author based on Pixabay image
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