Sunday, May 8, 2011
Sexual Politics
There goes that pesky sex drive again, making me do things I don't want to do. Making me bother that girl who just wants to be left alone. Making me go out and humiliate myself when I'd rather just stay in my comfort zone. I wish I could just turn it off, like a switch, so that I could concentrate on other things more productive. In truth, our sex drives have a purpose: they are what motivate us to procreate and this is of course the driving force of the continuum of all species.
I'm always amazed at how women can be sort of asexual in a way in terms of not being motivated by sex to do almost everything, as men mostly are. Then, they can suddenly become sexual creatures when they are with the right person in the right circumstance. It is a very peculiar outcome of thousands of years of human evolution. The hunter and gatherers that we were have conditioned women to attach emotional bonds with those men who could provide the most food and resources. They didn't think as much with their eyes and try to sleep with the first willing participant as the hunters did, and so they attached an emotional bond with a man first and then they become ferocious sexual beasts.
This is how things were with a girl I once dated. She had such an emotional bond with me that I excited her sexually by almost everything I did. Had I met her on the street or perhaps in a bar she might not have even been willing to engage in a conversation with me, let alone sleep with me. The same woman who would might not look at you twice, could suddenly become intensely sexual attracted to you if you struck the right emotional chords with her through the right situation. This has frustrated men since the beginning of time, who merely wanted to spread their seed without any emotional baggage.
Meeting women in bars has its ups and downs. On the one hand you can get laid really fast and even jump-start head first into a relationship in the fast track. These usually never last longer than a month or two. On the other hand you must deal with rejection from very beautiful and highly sexualized women who just want to go out for a drink and have a good time and who are not there to meet anyone. As frustrating as it is, the possibility of success far out weighs any fear of failure. That's evolution in a nutshell.
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I take exception to this characterisation of male sexuality (if I were capable of being offended, perhaps I would be ;) ). Whereas I did experience precisely this for much of my adult life, I no longer do.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to focus on the fact that the difference occurred through a spiritual encounter. That would distract us. What I would point out is that you have cited evolution as an excuse for what is basically uncontrolled (not uncontrollable) sexual urges. Our community's social norms completely support your point of view, and your assumptions, and so you have no real context in which to question it. You have, therefore, simply accepted a kind of enthralment to this paradigm of being "motivated by sex".
Previously, I was under the control of such a paradigm in precisely the manner you describe, but I am no longer. My sexual functions now work for me, and respond to my sovereignty over them in precisely the same way that my physical hunger, pain receptors, and other primal/temporal interfaces do: I decide when those urges are gratified and when they are dismissed as inappropriate. This is not "asexual", any more than it is "anorexic". It is more like a state of being "tamed", and simultaneously having the role of "tamer". It is, simply, "self control".
A Muslim leader actually said, on Australian national television, that a particular girl who was gang-raped should be considered the equivalent of leaving fresh meat in an alley: one cannot blame the alley cats for eating it. Your depiction of male sexuality is separated from that view only by degrees.
One's primal urges are not axioms of one's existence. They can be brought into a healthy relationship with our moral self, as so many women demonstrate - not because their sexuality is any less powerful, but because they are given a cultural paradigm in which to comprehend their responsibility to control it. Men, by and large, are not (in our society).
I never said that my sexual urges are what define me or what motivate my existence. This blog is really just a mere reflection on my condition at that time. I certainly know how to exercise control and I am in no way a slave to my sexual desires.
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