[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>] Friday, March 08, 2024
Apes of Paradise: A Young Lady's Guide to Men
Prologue:
This essay is one-sided. It is for women, about men. I'm writing it mainly for my future teenage daughters, but I'm writing it now because many adult, contemporary women have found this knowledge useful since it has been culturally eradicated over the last few generations despite being a core truth. A such, it is simultaneously obvious and yet completely misunderstood.
Figure 1: I am going to speak about men as if they're all the same. In truth, I'm speaking about the typical man, the average properties of all men, the quintessential man. Individual variation is boundless, and it is a given that there will be humans technically male for whom none of this applies, likely including most gay men, soy boys, transgenders, and asexuals. (It probably still applies to furries.) Each time you find yourself thinking "I know a guy who's not like that!", hear my voice saying "See Figure 1!"
Thirdly, I speak here of how things (men in particular) work, and how who you are and what you do influences men. I say nothing about what outcomes you should want--that is up to you.
"There are two kinds of men: Men who think about women 90% of the time and men who think about women 99% of the time. I am one of the former." -- James Watson (quoted approximately from memory; and yes, that James Watson: one of the early pioneers of being canceled.)The closest thing I've heard to the theme of this essay is some random comment on the internet by a woman who had overcome feelings of resentment around sex with her long-time boyfriend when she read somewhere that sex is how men express love. That re-framing changed the dynamic for her--I suppose now it was lovemaking instead of mere sex. And while she rightly moved on from the destructive memes that men have sex to dominate women, or to pleasure themselves using women or whatnot, she somewhat missed the mark on what sex is for men: It would be more accurate to say that sex is how men receive love. But that still is just a tip of an iceberg.
Most accurately, sex is the reason men do anything at all. Men get up in the morning for the prospect of having sex. They invent to have sex. They conquer continents to have sex. Given the choice between life with no sex, or sex followed by certain death, men--sufficiently and deeply and honestly aware of those two options--would choose the latter. Surely there are plenty of men who would say otherwise, and some of those are being honest, and maybe some of those even have some semblance of quality introspection, but see figure 1. The essence of being a man is to be motivated firstly and foremostly by sex. It is an evolutionary imperative--it can be no other way.
In less litigious times, I would insert a video here of a bird of paradise, or a bower bird, laboriously building a wild contraption or doing a crazy dance to impress the girls. All that work for one brief event, and if she's not impressed and leaves, he's despondent. But as long as there's any future prospect, he presses on.
They are birds of paradise because they are very successful in their niche: merely surviving isn't impressive, they need to excel. Humans are similarly situated, with other humans (other men!) being their only real competition. Next time you see a man peacocking, realize he really is. Don't be too fooled by the veneer of words and reason--they are just more fancy feathers. And definitely don't be fooled by a man who tells you he's above all that and he's just there for you: it's one of many successful strategies men use to get sex.
Now, none of this precludes men caring about other things. But other than perhaps the consequent of caring for their own offspring, as a first order of approximation, assume a man's raison d'être is sex and you'll be on the mark most of the time.
This begs the question what qualifies as sex. The male bird of paradise is motivated by the fertile female of his species, and nothing else. He doesn't do his dance for squirrels or falling leaves or his own shadow. He's hard-wired with a basic diagnostic method for detecting a healthy, fertile, prospective mate, mostly from remote sensory cues such as sight, sound, and smell.
Men are the same. Sex doesn't mean getting off, it means getting it on with a woman he finds sexually attractive. Men are motivated by the presence or abundance of attractive women--they are, like the green shoots and tasty bunnies and warm sun rays of spring, a promise of effort made worthwhile. (One reason businessmen frequent strip clubs is because they are foundationally motivational.) And while every man has his particular preferences, more or less they are hardwired signs of fertility and health like a 7/10ths hip-to-waist ratio, full, red lips, healthy hair and eyelashes, and so on. I state the obvious here because it's too often overlooked as mere objectification: these are evolutionary diagnostics as deep as any meaning or purpose we have.
Evolution also likes variation. The key here is not that all men are attracted to the same thing, but rather that all men have a metric for what attracts them. If they don't, or if theirs is too far off from objective (but contextual) health and fertility, they don't pass on their genes. True of every ancestor of every man alive, save for some transient interference by organized religions or other breeding cults.
The relevant corollary here is that men are neither motivated nor satisfied by the mere idea of you: those men die off masturbating in a closet. If your sexual modesty extends to your own mate, you may as well be that squirrel or falling leaf. Men don't firstly want sex with you, firstly they want to want sex with you. If you don't pass the diagnostic, you don't engage their raison d'être. (Conversely, now you know why men's self-loving usually starts with images/imagination of fertile women. Again "obvious" but misunderstood.)
In that respect, women are the true initiators of sex. Women are the ones who are fertile or aren't (although humans uniquely have hidden this so that a woman can wield that prospect outside of her true window of fertility). Consider again the birds of paradise: it is the female who initiates sex by showing up and standing in audience (and passing audio-visual diagnostics!). For most animal species, sex is initiated by the female--not through sexual aggression, but through sexual attraction.
It is worth note, too, that her being interested in itself is a key part of what marks her as fertile, and so a key part of what makes her attractive.
Here is a recurring pattern with humans: She believes men are the initiators of sex, and waits day after day, week after week, relationship after relationship for her man to show that he's attracted to her, pursuant some Harlequin trope about men unwrapping their woman like a gift. That might work once, or once in a while, but by and large she's just telling him (the animal him that runs the show) that she's infertile, or worse, that she's rejecting him.
By here one thing should be clear: As a woman, there is no grander judgment you can make than who you choose to sleep with. The men who tell you it's no big deal are just trying to get you in bed. When you sleep with the jerk, and friend-zone the good friend, you are stating clearly and to the world that you value the jerk more than you value the friend--no matter how many ways you try to say otherwise. You are declaring--at the animal, emotional level--nothing short of that one should live and one should die. Your friend (if your friend finds you attractive and sees you choose the jerk) will hear that, and so will the jerk. Again, it's up to you what you do, but just know this is what you do. (A companion essay to this one would explain why women pick the jerk. It's a valid choice, and a long topic.)
This, finally, leads to a litmus test you can use, a sort of Rosetta Stone, for translating to men's ears. If you want to know how something about sex sounds to a man, just replace sex with talking (it is a very imperfect analogy, but nonetheless a useful device):
Having a girlfriend who's shy about showing off her body is like having a boyfriend who's too shy to talk to you.
Saying that you are not, and should not be, obligated to have sex with your boyfriend will feel to him the same as if he declared to you that he is not, and should not be, obligated to talk to you. (Both are true...)
Resenting his desire to have sex daily (or whatever) feels to him like it would feel to you if he resented your desire to talk to him daily.
You don't want your boyfriend to talk to you because he feels obligated to. You don't want him to resent your desire or need to talk. What you want (most likely...) is, besides those times of natural synergy where you both want exactly the same thing at the same time, for him to genuinely enjoy talking to you--even when he's not in the mood to talk, even when he's not getting anything out of it directly at the moment, because he cares about you and enjoys giving you what you want or need.
Maybe he just needs to truly understand what you want or need. (But that is an essay for another day, by another person.)
The bottom line is not just that men think about sex a lot, but that sex for men--with someone they find attractive--is the emotional metric for whether they are doing ok in life. This is not by choice, and it cannot be chosen otherwise. It can lift men up, or tear them down. It makes men both predictable, and dangerous. Don't underestimate its priority for men--it is above safety and reason, let alone cultural etiquette. (Some will simply ignore your choice or preference, because that is also an evolutionarily viable strategy--high risk, high reward.)
Internalize this, and use it wisely. It can be equally a tool of manipulation, of kindness, or of cruelty. I hope you'll tend toward the middle.
"If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically." -- Jean-Paul Sartre[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>]