Index of all articles, click here
By Sam Zanahar (2007)
Conventional wisdom is that men want sex, and women want resources and commitment.
Evolutionary biologists have done questionary-based studies in many countries of the world, and found this to be a universal pattern.
Conventional wisdom sees this as the 'nature' of women, and claims that women just are less interested in sex.
And evolutionary biology has concluded that the female preference for resources and commitment, as well as an reduced interest in sex, are genetically encoded parameters.
I have high respect for biology as a science, and have an open ear for conventional wisdom.
But when it comes to female sexuality, the conclusions of the above-cited conventional wisdom and evolutionary biology are just crap.
Women need sexual satisfaction just as men do. And for atheist women with a high degree of self-cognition, sexual satisfaction is, just as for men, the only reasonable endeavor worth living for.
So, why did conventional wisdom and evolutionary biology get is so wrong on female sexuality?
The keywords in any answer to this question are safety, risk, and sexual market value.
A low level of safety and a high level of risk have an enormously dampening effect, not on sexual desire, but on sexual conduct. The same is true for circumstances that cause a rapid decline in sexual market value.
Women are not less sexual than men. They have just become experts in hiding and surpressing their sexuality, because for women for millenia, the natural and social environment has always been less advatageous than for men.
Women have always been, and still are, more likely to need protection.
When humans were hunters and gatherers, women (especially when they were pregnant) could not run as fast as men when attacted by predators.
When humans lived in early civilizations, and invented weapons, women were less capable to defend themselves on their own.
And in modern societies with high crime rates, women are much more likely than men to get gang-raped.
If we were to place men into environments of corresponding risk levels, the pattern of male sexuality would also change. The effect of a lack of safety is the same for men and women: a preference for more monogamous relationships that provide safety in addition to, or even instead of, sexual pleasure.
But it's not just worries about being attacked (by lions, enemy soldiers, or rape gangs) that impact on the sexual preferences of women.
For women throughout the ages, having sex has always been associated with the risk of pregnancy. Even from a casual encounter, they could get fertilized, and the course of their lives could be shaped entirely from the consequences of such a single sexual encounter. The man in the same encounter could just forget about it the hour after it has happened.
But pregnancy has a major impact not only because a woman will be burdened with a child. It also causes a sharp decline in the sexual market value of a woman, as a pregnancy causes numerous physical changes to the body of a woman which undoubtedly reduce her beauty and sex appeal.
Yet another aspect that causes women to be more careful with sexual encounters is reputational pressure. In many countries, women are badly punished for living out their sexuality in occasional encounters. In most other countries, girls and women who do, are bad-mouthed.
Most men, even many conventional wisemen and scientists, are fools who fail to understand women. They should imagine being in the risk situation of women, and watch the effect on their sexual conduct. Gone would be the nonchalance with which they pursue sexual adventures.
The fact is, women have an enormous sex drive, not just when they are married or in their 30s, but even as teenagers. Girls and women have a sex drive which easily matches the one of boys and men.
I have always been a feminist. I have always supported any political measure inclined to create safer societies so that women do not need specific men as protectors. I have always supported the right of women not to become pregnant. I always defended women against being decried as loose for pursuing sexual adventures.
And all of this not because it would have been, and is, politically correct but for a very practical reason: female sexual liberation would greately benefits me.
I an not afraid to compete with other men for the best women in societies in which women can choose men based on sexual attraction.
It's the low-quality men who favor social orders in which women are either allocated in accordance to religious traditions, or in which female sexual expression is a high-risk behavior. Low-quality men are against the sexual liberation of women because they would not be selected by any.
Index of all articles, click
here
Copyright Sam Zanahar