Just what is our sociosexual evolutionary heritage?
Here is a comment left by Christopher Ryan, author of “Sex at Dawn“:
The ‘ancient biological reasons’ that you’re referring to are currently being called into question by serious primatologists and anthropologists.
It is not really obvious that ancient homo sapiens really gave a fuck about paternity, because it wouldn’t have been obvious to them how sex and reproduction were actually related considering everybody was banging everybody.
Also add to this the fact that not only are women naturally promiscuous, but men are attracted to other men having sex with women ( your web browser history will back this up. )
This is why women scream during sex. to attract more men to join the fight. Literally, almost, considering the fight that takes place inside the woman. Not only does one sperm compete against millions of your own, but millions of other men. Considering women’s immune system treats sperm as invaders, women select their mates on a cellular level regardless of what their instincts might tell them.
A lot of this research calls the science behind the alpha male / game worldview into question. It isn’t that I’m arguing against evolutionary biology, either. I’m arguing for it, against a conception of it which mistakes our very recent cultural shifts ( agriculture ) as a constant in our 200k year + history.
It only made sense for men to care about virgins with the invention of private property which is passed down along paternal lines, agriculture, and a division of labor. This is a cultural adaptation not an ancient biological fact.
How do we know ancient (i.e. pre-agricultural man) didn’t give a fuck about paternity, or that they didn’t know that sex eventually led to children? And if it’s true that they were unconcerned with who’s the daddy, what relevance does this have for modern post-agricultural humans, who have had 10,000 – 12,000 years to evolve a different reaction to the threat of false paternity and female sluttiness? We now know distinct traits can evolve rather quickly in different human population groups. See: Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence, northern European lactose tolerance.
From what we know of modern hunter-gatherer societies (the Yanomamo, for instance), homicide rates are incredibly high. Something like 30% of men in those tribal societies are killed off by acts of male-on-male violence. This would release some of the competitive pressure on the men for mates. In a society with a heavily skewed male-female ratio favoring men, “everybody banging everybody” wouldn’t elicit as much of a jealousy response if each man was spreading his seed with multiple women, increasing his chances to procreate.
Women are naturally promiscuous, true, but to a lesser extent than men and in a different way. Women’s impetuous promiscuity is a function of their ovulatory cycle, in large part, where they seek alpha genes one week out of the month. Men’s promiscuity is noncyclical. Men can cheat whenever and wherever, and can do so whether in love or out of love with their primary partner. Women are often emotionally unable to cheat if they are in love with their partner.
Addressing Ryan’s other points, there is no evidence that men in any significant number outside of a tiny fetishist minority enjoy cuckold porn, or are attracted to other men having sex with women. If you look at porn, you’ll notice that the most popular videos (really, 90% of the videos on major porn sites) block out the male actor’s face. The camera zooms in on the penetrating cock and the woman’s body and face contorted with (albeit faked) pleasure. The man’s face and chest are deliberately excised from as much of the sex scenes as possible. What men really like to watch is women having sex with a disembodied cock, (hence, point of view porn, which is very popular), into which the viewer can imagine he is the one fucking the girl.
Do women scream during sex to attract more men to the fight, or to warn other men away? I don’t see how the former is more clearly the reason than the latter. Or is there another explanation why women scream during sex? Perhaps to advertise their attractiveness to alpha males to other women, as a sort of status competition?
It’s understood that the penis is shaped like a sperm scoop, and that this is evidence that there is some amount of sperm competition resulting from female promiscuity going on. But there is also the powerful emotion of jealousy, a painful emotion which is not socially constructed, but is instead a visceral hindbrain reaction in the majority of men to thoughts of their women fucking other men. Did jealousy really evolve in just the last 10,000 years, or has it been with humanity for eons? It is possible that jealousy is a more recent evolution in the human psyche, and perhaps there are population group level differences in how much jealousy is experienced as a motivating impulse. (Maybe Africans feel less jealousy than Asians toward cheating partners.)
Whatever the evolution of jealousy, it is clearly an indicator that men DO give a fuck about paternity, and are NOT Ok with promiscuous women as long term partners who have been chosen to carry their young. If virginity weren’t valued by men, there would be no market for it. But in many large scale societies, not only is there an implicit market for virgins, there is an overt market for them. Did the invention of private property cause this powerful drive in men to seek out virgins in many parts of the world, or has the drive been a part of the neuronal network of the male brain for longer than that? Occam’s Razor normally falls on the side of biological imperative rather than social construction, as the latter is rarely an answer for anything except as a comforting illusion to help feminists and assorted blank slate lefties to sleep at night.
Bottom line is that there seems to be evidence for some kind of a balance between the sperm competition-female promiscuity nexus and mate guarding jealousy, and that this balance varies by population group. (r selected populations may lean more toward the large male genitals-female promiscuity part of the spectrum.) Double bottom line: Do you really want to live in a society where men don’t give a fuck about paternity and “everybody is fucking everybody”? We already have an example of what such a society might look like: sub-saharan Africa.
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Interesting comment left by Rum:
What is the advantage to a woman of being less-than-aware of her actual arousal? It helps with her pretending to love a type of guy that her pussy really does not want. After all, if we accept the 80:20 rule regarding men and gina tingles, a lot of women are doomed to be paired via monogamy with a guy they never truly wanted – for sex. It is simple math. How could too much awareness of her true pussy-feelings help her attract a beta? It is just an extra burden for her to carry. So nature gives her an anesthetic for those unwelcome, burdensome insights.
This angle deserves further reflection. A lot of supposedly low libido women are simply women who settled for resource providing beta males who don’t sexually excite them. It’s already been shown that women are more likely to orgasm when they step out with an alpha male during that golden week of ovulatory sluttitude. If women were consciously aware of the connection between what they find attractive and what arouses them — in the same way men are aware of the connection — then women might be less inclined to remain loyal to the beta provider, and thus jeopardize the raising of their young. Or maybe the arousal ignorance is the cause of the infamous female caprice, which serves as a mate-selecting strategy ensuring that only men who are good with women will be able to navigate her seemingly illogical whims.
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