01.29.06
a digression about evolved sex motives
back to the concept that men have intrinsically higher sex drives than women… and why this is potentially fallacious (or at least poorly framed). the question might be better asked as this: do women have less natural interest in sex or not? my answer remains a tentative (open for discussion) NO. (and i’ll save the talk about defining what “sex” is).
prior to written history (we were tribal before we were nuclear families living on the same street driving the same car but never meeting our neighbors), human females lived with much less sense of consequence when it came to sex.
that is, before knowledge of how women became pregnant was validated as a phenomenon, women could engage in coitus (with a man or a woman) as an act of pleasure and sharing in much the same manner we observe in our good friends the bonobos.
because the not-so-obvious connection had not been made that sex with men resulted invariably in child-birth (and if you think it’s obvious just ask a perfectly intelligent five year old (who is already capable of complex thoughts, tool-using, language comprehension, writing, and reading) where babies come from).
as odd as it seems, the fact is that there were millenia in our evolution as a species that passed with absolutely no explicit knowledge that semen going in the vagina at one point would result in a baby nine months later coming out the same passage.
during these the primitive times of our unwritten human history, we were forming much of what dictates the progression of possible behaviors now. and sex was made to be fundamentally pleasurable to both members– at every level (just look at the clitoris!).
in a relative sense, the duration of time has been quite short where humans have explicitly understood heterosexual sex to be the true bringer of babies (although there has always been some sort of hazy connection with the seed… but which seed? the nine months later seed or the seed nine months earlier or somewhere in between?).
is any other animal on the planet with an inkling of what the act they engage in during their periods of sexual receptivity leads to? they are just humping because all of the brain activity and hormonal levels are primed for sexual arousal and subsequent response.
really if you think about it, our genes have a vested interest in both members being highly receptive and interested in sex… and funnily enough, we’ve evolved to be sexually receptive ALL the time.
being human, we’re the proud owners of a brain so massive and self-aware that sex (as a fundamental part of genetic survival) has become a multi-tiered, many-faceted, socially volatile and still so essential part of social interactions and exchanges, that even today, marriage is a relationship that allows otherwise unconnected citizens of different countries the right to join another country. that’s the power of sex people– pure and simple.
the idea that a woman should inherently have a lower sex drive is not sensible from an evolutionary stance if one notes that the male desire to have sex with as many women as possible is also beneficial to the ever-receptive female as millenia passed in our evolution where we lacked any explicit knowledge of the reproductive process.
the proof is in the pudding– females are consistently able to engage in sexual behaviors (and specifically intercourse except when we are mentally/emotionally unreceptive of course). the genetic argument for lower sex drive implies that our genes would be privy to the complex explicit knowledge about the consequences of heterosexual sex on the young female body (something which only exists as a fact in written human history and quite recently too).
genetically speaking, it would be in the female’s interest to mate with as many men as she deemed sexually attractive as sex in and of itself would only guarantee that she had a child.
from an evolutionary standpoint, men would be the ones with a vested interest in monogamy — for women, to ensure they weren’t wasting their energy and resources raising another male’s child. still, even this rather feminist statement assumes a level of explicit knowledge that could not have been a consistent part of our anscestoral past).
whereas the multi-orgasmic capacity of women points to a different reality: sex with many men over a lifetime might actually be more gratifying (this is just fun theorizing) and provide true “sperm competition.”
(we can skip the talk about what we’ve evolved to find sexually attractive– it’s dull and i’m bored just thinking about it… sexually attractive is sexually attractive whether it’s evolved or socialized and all sexually attractive people are HEALTHY unless you’re very unwell yourself and have no standards as a result of desperation).
the idea that women maintain a lower sex drive is much more sensible from a socio-economic paradigm, wherein sex is a desired “good” which men want and women possess. this is specifically relevant when women as a whole possess less power and resources than men.
in this paradigm, women don’t want sex as much because they would then compromise their ability to manipulate their stake as the controller of sex. in the same vein, when the population of women is higher than men, men have increased freedom to select from a larger pool of women who might give sex, as well as forcing women to “compete” for the limited supply of men– which means men (the wanters of sex) will be less likely to wait around before you decide to hand over the pussy as they know it’s likely they can take a dip elsewhere. thus, when the population of men is lower, they are able to more effectively control/manipulate the sexual stakes.
(there are some fun post-war stats, which of course gave us the baby-boom… men were really getting laid back then!)
yes, yes it’s all very interesting and quite neat (and logical really)– this economic model, but it has it’s fundamental limitation in that it can’t be filtered through an evolutionary sieve with the same amount of aplomb.
indeed, economics is something that humans have created to comprehend our behavior in supply and demand paradigms, which although quite significant to the current situation do not inherently bind themselves to evolutionary principles of an irrefutable type.
such a neat economic theory of sex is up to its elbows in behaviors that are invariably indoctrinated, acculturated, learned, and only then internalized as part of our decision-making behaviors.
there are far too many inputs (into sexual behaviors and any economical explanation thereof) at a societal level to ignore the fact that everything we do in the market place is only really sensible in the mind of a fully “evolved” complex learned human state… and not just a mere evolutionary residue of this supposedly primal behavior.
what we’ve got to get into our heads about human sexual behavior is that as a species we are unique in our continuous sexual receptivity, which is such a pervasive and powerful trait with far-reaching social implications (family, politics, everything is run by sex at some level) that it cannot be dismissed as some sort of core animal behavior over which we have no real ability to control much less define (save via massive governing bodies which dictate what forms of sex are valid, perverse, normal, and not).
take a step back from all the heady evolutionary theorizing and remember how utterly personal sex is, despite it’s animal end (the orgasm is very primal– there’s no nice way to pull that off in public)… remember the kinds of sex that can be had, the variance in terminology to reflect the incredible breadth of innovation and imagination which goes into this funny act. and then ask yourself how much you trust that the sexual behaviors you engage in aren’t somehow a reflection of what constitutes the most private, subconscious, and honest parts of who you are at any given point in time … not just some sort of innavoidable evolved state animal humping.
still doesn’t answer the question WHY so many women apparently are less interested in sex now… but, i do love to take a good blow away from the victim-thinking of quasi-evolutionary theory