28 June 2010

get to the point please

say what about women?

Sexually that is. I'm not sure he really offered much clarity to the idea that women are distinct from each other in some way (other than the obvious individual particularities), in so far as how their sex drives and response to them works. Somewhere in there that was the gist that he wanted to communicate but wandering off to get to the point that a high female sex drive correlates (some) with complex attractions and group/same-sex sexual encounters doesn't seem to explain the rest of the female population's complex responses.

Other than to contrast it with the remarkable simplicity of almost any male response (which we are happy to oblige I guess), it's apparently really hard to explain why one woman responds to this, but not that, and vice versa, and then some other woman responds to both, another to neither. I suppose as long as you're an eager young male who likes figuring these things out in a partner, and she's willing to play along, it's not a problem (presumably the same issue if it's a woman and another woman, only doubled). What's amusing about this "mystery" is that we're still wasting time trying to solve the issue with a pill. My guess is that the sex drive chemical response would work a lot better by simply talking back and forth openly. Including about sex. The reason being that it doesn't appear that the mind is always listening to the body on this one and the communication clears up when the mind should listen to the body (or when it shouldn't). With men it's usually pretty obvious when the genitals are in the drivers seat. Women are better at ignoring them or don't know what it is saying, probably for cultural reasons more than anything else.

Back to the anthropology, there's some fudging going on here to fix this to the hypothetical based on behavior I think, but basically the idea is that smart people can adapt more readily to changes in norms from biological or evolutionary norms. The problem of course is that it's not just idiots running around having affairs. In fact, smarter men, and especially smarter women, have more. It would seem in part that smarter people are better at concealing their infidelities, and thus better at executing some "hypocrisy" between their actions and their behaviors, but I'd also agree that in large part the problem is that intelligent people on average tend to have more options. They're more successful, they tend to be taller and more attractive (by adopting, if not establishing and manipulating, the norms of beauty standards) and these things tend toward having more sexual options in modern society. Having more options could simply be taken to mean escape routes from bad, failing, or dysfunctional relationships. And in truth, probably more understanding couples that would tolerate straying off once in a while with some intellectual defences and explanations. I'm not sure this is ideal, but it's more or less how I'd approach the situation of dealing with a wandering mating pair choice. It's probably superior than a response of abuse and/or control anyway.

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