Can there be any real doubt that for many, many people life is blighted by thwarted sexual desire? Hands up, all of you, who have ever been dumped, ever been rejected, ever been snubbed. Hands up, all those of you who have ever felt immured in a sexually moribund monogamous relationship that you nonetheless maintained for social approval, financial convenience, the children, and so on. Hands up, any of you who on some not-so-enchanted evening, gazed across a crowded room at someone wonderful whom you dared not even approach for fear of the snub that would otherwise be coming. Finally, hands up those of you who’ve ever spent a morose evening at home, alone, with Internet porn. Or a romance novel.
Those of you whose hands are still down should leave, because you obviously have much more fun things to be doing right now that reading this post. I fear this not though, and trust that I still have most of my readership.
Multiply your experiences, dear remaining readers, by the several billion post-pubescent people on the planet (discount, if you must, for the few happy souls who left our little exercise supra) and you will find that you can fill oceans of woe.
What is going on here? It’s pretty obvious that human beings are hypersexual primates. I am somewhat skeptical about claims that men and women are all that different with respect to frequency and variety of partners, at least once we control for centuries of indoctrination about appropriate gender roles. Folks I respect on sometimes take a somewhat different view about male-female differences, arguing that differences in male and female desires are sufficiently different that sexual markets don’t really clear and that therefore a great deal of sexual suffering is inevitable. If so, tant pis pour nous. But I am going to assume for the sake of argument that women as well as men have a taste for sexual variety and a strong drive for sex. This is a reasonable position, consistent with a great mass of anthropological evidence summarized (a bit polemically, to be sure) in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. It’s also consistent with my own experiences observing men and women.
So we are, almost all of us, a bunch of randy little fuckers. And guess what? We live in an amazing technological world where we can make children and other hazards of sex go away. (Sexually transmitted diseases are indeed something of a problem, but we can blunt these with safer practices and better medicine and hey, didn’t a prominent economist also show us that more sex is safer sex?) And we live in great, diverse, and often dense environments saturated with near-magical communications technology. Every one of us has an ability to meet orders of magnitude more people than our band-level forager ancestors. So what does the world look like? The giant bonobo orgy that we might think that hypersexual primates would make in such a world?
Apparently not. We’re stuck with a lot of lonely, thwarted people instead. Why?
The most common answers to this question appear to blame dysfunctional social norms of some kind or another. We suffer from patriarchy or prudery or (insert what you hate here) and if we could just get rid of that things would be good.
Now don’t get me wrong here: gender inequality and prudish sexual norms are problems that are real and which might be getting worse, and it would be splendid to do something about them. But I am not optimistic that rectifying them will make the sexual world all that much a better place. Achieve beyond-Scandinavian levels of gender equality in economic and political and household life, make everyone open and unashamed about sex as you like. Even assume that our evolved psychologies are cooperative and nice. I am sure that the oceans of sexual woe will remain mostly full.
And why that is will be the subject for the next post in the series.
5 Responses to “You don’t screw enough, Part 1”
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I’m not too sure myself about women and men having the same sex drive. I think women have sex drives larger than what the media typically claims, but not as large as the male sex drive. I say this simply because it makes sense for them not to: sperm is cheap, eggs are valuable. A woman back in the day needed to choose an appropriate partner so their offspring would be genetically viable – men had no such need, because not only do they not carry a baby to term, but they can simply get up and leave if they find it an unsuitable use of their time. For men, more sex = more offspring, if they are not being monogamous about things. For women more sex doesn’t result in anything if they are already pregnant. Still, I think what the 60s (free love etc.) has told us is that human nature is quite malleable beyond what we evolved for, so I definitely don’t doubt that women’s sex drives are probably increasing to meet the demands on them and shifting cultural norms etc. – I just don’t think they’re quite there yet. (Maybe I’m wrong though – maybe women’s need to choose a mate means that once they have a worthy mate, they have sex as much as possible to ensure that the mate stays. I don’t really know, not possessing a vagina myself. Maybe we should do a user survey on this?)
The assumption that appears to be behind this comment is that for humans, sex is primarily about reproduction. is this really true? Somehow I doubt it. It seems like a lot of sex is about cementing friendships and alliances (and just plain having fun) rather than making babies, and, if Sex at Dawn is right, this is true of life in the forager societies in which humans have existed for perhaps 95% of their time on earth.
Note also that in the human EEA people lived in small bands characterized by very tight mutual dependence. As best I understand it, under these conditions “free to leave” would have usually meant something like “free to starve.”
Sex may not have primarily been about reproduction, but it had that as a consequence – which is why I somewhat doubt the claim that it was used in an altogether recreational manner in the past. It’s all fun and games until someone gets pregnant, at which point if the weak, sickly guy had his way with the woman, her kids aren’t going to turn out the best. She gets outbred by the more choosier women, their alleles for choosiness dominate and so on. But with knowledge of less developed peoples, I think you could be right about sex TO AN EXTENT in forager tribes – but there is always an element of genetic fitness in the matter. But with regards to what I wrote earlier, I happen to remember a couple of studies on the female sex drive. It waxes and wanes apparently, so I’m guessing despite my explanations it probably is on average close to the male sex drive. But again, I don’t know, so I can’t really compare.
Observation: there need not be a unique way of being fit, and I can’t think of a reason why the “good” alleles would necessarily all be found in the same man. The ones that will help your child be good at gathering plants might be in one man, the ones that will optimize her ability to survive a drought in another, and the ones that give her good resistance to novel parasites (which are evolving much faster than you can, keep in mind) in still a third. So even in a purely reproductive context, promiscuity might be a rational strategy. A woman having multiple children by different biological fathers would be like an investor constructing a portfolio with multiple instruments; both are diversifying away from risk.
Hand up!
And yes, It’s Mostly Society’s Fault ™. Sad but true. Another substantial percentage of the woe is created by the people who can’t adapt to society’s norms for dating or relationships. Whether that is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.