Enlightenment

Orgasms since last entry: Nine

It must be time for me to check in again, several days having slipped past since my previous post. Today seems like a good occasion to do so, since I figured out something interesting (well, interesting to me).

Al right, let me back up. Over at Todger Talk, I came across a post about the dreaded phenomenon of frienditis - that is, the tendency for well-intentioned guys to get classified as non-sexual friends by women, even though the guy wants more than just Platonic friendship. And thus he winds up being the shoulder she cries on as she bemoans all the disastrous dates she goes on, and all the lousy guys with nothing to recommend them (whom she sleeps with none-the-less), and he misses out on getting the chance to be the perfect partner she says she's looking for (a lover and a friend). The author of this post was basically wondering whether to admit that he found the lady in question sexy, and risk rejection and the loss of the friendship, or keep his mouth shut and be condemned to the status quo.

If this sounds familiar, it's because this post is turning into a sequel to my previous one, about why nice men can't get nice girls, and why girl run off with bad boys.

So here's the secret, the point of enlightenment. The reason men and women have these problems boils down, once again, to evolutionary biology. Despite the fact that women are more orgasmic than men, men can make babies a lot faster. There's no reason, in principle, that a virile man can't make anywhere from one to a dozen offspring a day. Women, on the other hand, take nine months to make a baby (or a few, in rare cases). Men need to keep an eye out for partners who look attractive (for attractive read "young and healthy", or "carrying good genes") while women need to keep an eye out for partners who will be sexually successful (so that their offspring are also sexually successful), and also for a partner who will be able to take care of the children they have invested so many months in producing. So the bottom line is this; males have one scale of attractiveness, females have two seperate scales. Let's call these the 'sexual' scale, and the 'provider' scale.

The reason for frienditis becomes clear. Everyone is unconsciously rating the members of their social circle against these scales. While the males are rating women in terms of how fuckable they are, and expecting women to treat them the same, the women are rating males against both scales and categorising them accordingly. Hence the males usually don't understand that their attempts to be polite, attentive, courteous, and so on, increase their ranking on the 'provider' scale, but not the 'sexual' scale. In fact, if you think about it, all the ideas of what consitutes polite gentlemanly behaviour arose several hundred years ago when western civilisation was declaring sex to be unseemly, and placing great emphasis on marrying and establishing a family, so it makes sense that the way men were trained to behave was the way that increased their ranking on the 'partner' scale. Likewise, women inherently expect men to segregate long-term partners and sexual interests.

As we all know, confusion and misery tend to arise when the world does not function as our mental paradigms would lead us to expect. When men rank women according to their sex appeal, women get annoyed at being treated like pieces of meat. When women classify men as friends, guys get frustrated that their efforts to be polite and courteous are not getting them any closer to the object of their devotion's bed. Women often condemn men for thinking with their genitals, but when you look at it this way it's clear that men and women are equally acting according to their reproductive desires - women's behaviour is just more difficult to see through because they're grading everyone on two scales instead of one.

So what does all this have to do with me? Well, it clears up a long-standing issue about the breakup with my previous girlfriend (prior to Queenie). For a long time I beat myself up trying to understand what I did wrong to make the relationship fall apart, how much of it was my fault, how much of it was her, and all the usual issues that crop up a surrounding such events. Well, the backstory is that we were in an open relationship. She slept with other guys, I... tried to sleep with other women. Truth be told, I didn't have much success. The motivation for this blog is to document my path from being the kind of guy who only has long-term relationships, to someone who can have just as much casual sex as my female partners seem to manage so effortlessly (yes, it really is easier for women to pick-up than for guys!). But in any case, the guys she would sleep with tended to be older than me, less good-looking than me, and fairly high-ranking at work. We often joked that her priorities were backwards - she'd chosen me, young, fit and good-looking (clearly someone with good genes) as the long-term partner, and was sleeping around with the old, senior, rich "providers". But in fact I realise now that I was the provider, I was the guy who was being nice enough to stay around for the long haul, and she was sleeping with guys who had high status (they'd proven themselves to be successful, and hence, they must have good genes). Things went sour when two things happened - I started seeing Queenie, and my career started to develop and I began to get better work than I had when we first started dating. I suspect that what these two events did was show that I was successful, and that other people considered me fuckable. This had the effect of pushing me off the 'partner' scale, and onto the 'sexual' scale, until I was dumped from the role of prospective father for her children.

In summary, it looks like humans naturally partner up, into pseudo-monogamous pairings. But we're not truly monogamous. The interesting thing is that women and men have different ways of being non-monogamous. Men tend to seek lots of casual encounters. Women tend to pick a stable long-term partner, and then "cheat" on them. Or to put it another way, women want to cuckold their husbands - men just don't want to get married. I'm a big believer in open/polyamorous relationships, and I expect this has interesting consequences for the way such relationships function.

Of course, just because a certain type of behaviour is "natural" doesn't make it right. You could argue that rape and infanticide are "natural". It's up to all of us to decide what we consider ethically acceptable, and to act accordingly.

Of course, much of what I said here is a simplification, but hey, it's a blog entry, not a psychology PhD thesis!