Like, say, a bar where twenty guys are looking at a woman more than is ‘proper’, and after several chat her up, she chooses the one who seems richest/coolest/whateverest to her, and they go home and screw?
What fish and humans have in common is that this selection ritual often occurs in schools.
But how can you be sure that you “didn’t need anyone to tell you”? Assuming that you have normal male heterosexual sexuality, you experienced your first sexual feelings around age 12 or 13. By the time that had happened, you had already been receiving messages about what constitutes proper sexuality for a long time. You could look all around and see that the vast majority of couplings involved one man and one woman. You had overheard numerous men talking about which women they found attractive. You had seen thousands of movies, books, magazines, and TV shows that delivered messages about what sort of woman you ought to find attractive. How can you separate out the effects of all that from innate effects?
Or look at it this way. There have been societies where all of the men in certain social classes were expected to lean towards homosexuality, as in ancient Greece or Arabia. There have been societies where chastity was considered to be one of the highest virtues, and marriage was considered a second-rate solution for those not morally strong enough. etc… Merely saying that culture and genetics both have some effect doesn’t answer the question of why there should be such wide variation in human sexuality. The term “culture” is merely the shorthand for the decisions made by a large number of human beings. To say that culture has some effects merely pushes the question back a little bit. If human men have a genetic push towards promiscuity with women, then whence comes the cultures that encourage men to do the opposite?
Well, this is a simplified understanding that is filtered through your own cultural goggles.
Take traditional Chinese thinking. Woman is yin, that dark, sensual, animalistic void. Man is yang- civilized, rational and controlled. Men were considered to be at peril from their exposure to yin, and all kinds of complicated systems were created where men could preserve their yang without being destroyed by the raw power of female sexuality.
Or take cultures where menstruating women are isolated. In the West, we are kind of told that they are isolated because their period makes them bad and unclean. But in many cultures it is the opposite. Menstruating women are considered to have some kind of uncontrolled connection to the spiritual world, and their blood is too powerful to have just hanging around the village uncontrolled like that.
I’m pretty sure Arabic culture also traditionally considers women to be a kind of black hole of lust, and need the bounds of marriage to keep them civilized and in line.
I believe women’s sex drives are highly tamed, channeled, and socialized, but at bottom, this rule applies: no dominance, no sexiness. To be sexually desirable, a man has to embody at least some symbolic alpha status, some will to superiority over other men. (I’ll be postmodern enough to say that dominance over other men is enough; he need not actually dominate women if he can show his fitness to do so.)
If you doubt me, ladies, ask yourself this: when has the last satisfying relationship you had with a man you didn’t see as tops, the best, the winner in some way or another?
Quoth wsbenge:
Wow, it only took a single sentence before you managed to completely contradict yourself. “If it feels good, do it” is precisely what instinct is.
Back on topic, what the OP is talking about isn’t a question of differing sex drives. Women want to have sex just as much as men do; it’s just a question of with whom. As the saying goes, a woman wants one man to satisfy her every need, while a man wants every woman to satisfy his one need. Males are evolutionarily biased towards wanting many different partners, while females are evolutionarily biased towards wanting one dedicated partner.
No, he spent evenings at the Drones Club that he CLAIMED were at his alienist’s.
That isn’t instinct. That would easily support hetero, homo, and bi behavior.
Talk to men and women about their behavior, and you will find that it is the rare woman who wants to have sex as aften as the average male.
Instinct would hop her bones in the bar, during a few fights among the males.
I think we should just ask the ladies of the SDMB just how hot are they for the men around them. Go to the source.
When you use too broad a brush then the assertion is meaningless. Men and women are very different in the nature of their sex drives but also the intensity of their sex drives evolves differently over their lifetimes. Furthermore, “sex” covers a lot of things besides a quickie fuck for reproduction purposes.
Some general observations. Men generally are more willing to have sex with people they hardly know. Women feel more need to know the person and have a positive impression. Men are more attracted to a variety of partners while women tend to be more monogamous. Men are more visually stimulated than women which explains why appearance is more important to us and why we are much more consumers of porn. Women are more inspired by deeper feelings of trust, feeling cared for, loved, etc.
Men and women also peak at different ages and in different ways in their sexual urges. Many men get to an age where they pretty much lose interest in sex, especially with their wives, but the wives at are their peak.
Which explains why in many married couples it is the wife who wants more sex and it is the husband who loses interest. But give him the chance if laying a pretty woman and he’ll do it without second thought.
I remember an old joke I saw. The husband is reading the newspaper and says to his wife. “Huh, this is interesting. There is a tribe in Africa where women pay men $10 each time they have sex.” And the wife responds “I’d like to see if you could survive on $20 a month.”
Conversely, in teenagers it is normally the males who have an endless supply of horniness and will fuck anything that moves whereas teenage females are at their peak of needing love and affection.
All in all it is a lousy system and if God truly existed I am sure he could have done a better job without trying too hard.
As previously pointed out, you’re contradicting yourself here: “If it feels good, do it”, is instinctive behaviour.
But anyway, all I was trying to make was what I thought would be an uncontentious point: that the core of our sexuality at least must be instinctive.
The idea that humans would have had no instinct to procreate and would have had to come up with a culture that would somehow make people want to have sex I think is so absurd I can’t think of any argument to make the point any clearer.
Well, aside from the overall silliness of suggesting all attraction is cultural, I have other reasons for supposing that I didn’t need anyone to tell me.
In my case, I’ve always been attracted to girls. One of my very first memories of going to school was noticing “Hey…girls are pretty”. And throughout my infancy I was always attracted to girls. It’s not something that started at 12-13 for me, all that happened during that time from my point of view was women became sexy as well as pretty.
And actually, think about it: if sexuality is cultural as you’re contending, why should it happen at 12-13? Why should it correspond with hormonal and other changes in the body?
What “wide variation”? It seems to me that the handful of possible exceptions (e.g. the ancient Greeks) get trotted out again and again when in fact the vast majority of cultures operate the same as we’re familiar with: women desiring fewer partners of high status, men desiring more partners, and being more interested in physical attractiveness. Think of the very one-sided history of prostitution for example.
Is the idea of sexual instincts so unpalatable to you that you can’t see the emporer’s swinging schlong?
Erm…yes…and of course homo and bi behaviour is instinctive too. Few scientists think that homosexuality is a choice (to any signficant degree). Whether it’s genetic or something that happens in the womb/infancy is the main debate (I definitely come down on the genetic side).
Perhaps yes. But the fact we don’t act like that doesn’t prove the instinct doesn’t exist, merely that we can consciously suppress it.
The same way a person on a hunger strike suppresses an instinct. (And actually, we suppress our instincts hundreds of times a day, the hunger strike is just a particularly clear example).
I don’t agree with any of this, but beyond that it’s also a bit decides the point.
I believe you’ve created a false dichotomy in limiting the comparison to monogamy versus promiscuity. There may have been (or be, today) situations where these are the typical choices, but there’s no reason to think this was always so throughout history. So the valid comparison might be in a society in which everyone was promiscuous, IOW that the institution of marriage had not yet been created, and the choice was mildly promiscuous versus really really promiscuous.
Or after marriage existed, the choice is still there, since the overwhelming majority of ancient civilizations were polygamous, unless I am mistaken. So a guy with a stronger sex drive would still have more offspring, since he’s be more motivated to have more wives than a guy who was more into other things.
This is OT, but I think you’re wrong about both of these. The ancient societies that you refer to exalted man-boy relationships, but as an addition to heterosexual marriages, not as a replacement for them. And while there may have been societies that officially exalted celibacy, there was probably never a long-lasting one in which this was widely practiced, for obvious reasons.
That’s exactly what I said. Women are NOT thought to have great lust, rather they have power over men, and their power over the men derives from the fact that men are thought to have great lust.
I don’t think this is true, as above.
The vast majority of sedentary cultures with highly organized power systems, you mean. In these cultures (like our own), inheritance and bloodlines are quite important and sexual morality codes basically serve to preserve them. In cultures with other power systems, we see a lot more variation.
The are cultures where young women are most marriageable if she has already proven her fertility by having a baby. There are cultures where children can have two fathers. The Woodabe Fulani, pastoralist nomads in West Africa, hold beauty pageants for the young men and let woman pick out the most beautiful for their husband (they get to sleep with them for a short period before finalizing the marriage.) Taureg pastoralists also consider male beauty to be much more essential than female beauty, and require their men to veil themselves.
Of course these days, most of the people we come into contact with are from sedentary cultures with highly structured power systems. Which is why there are greater varieties of family structures in isolated parts of the developing world, where different power structures still exist. It’s arrogant to see your own culture as the default and the others as the odd variations. But don’t forget- we’ve seen our own culture’s family structure change pretty quickly, as well.
If instinct was really so directly expressed, we wouldn’t see this kind of variety. There are no random monogamous dog packs. You don’t run into the occasional matriarchal gorilla tribe. But you do find exceptions to every rule in human society.
I’m not saying there are no sexual instincts. Of course there are. But culture can twist one basic instinct into a variety of ways- hence the huge and almost unfathomable variety of human cultural practices. Cute speculation about the caveman origins of our day to day life is a bit like interpreting dreams. It’s fun enough. And there may be a drop of truth in it now and then. But in the end the subject is just too complex for the cutest and pattest explanations to be anything more than a parlor game.
Ain’t my fault if she only gives me two earning opportunities a month, is it?
We here omit the story about President and First Lady Coolidge and the prize bull, and I’ll drop another something I’ve heard about losing interest in sex - which is that it is how women typically behave once they have attracted their mate. Cite. It’s pure bait and switch, though I don’t say it’s done with malice aforethought.
I think it is true, however, that what lust women do have is rooted in notions of male power.
Those feelings may make a woman open to sex, but they are not going to awaken her drive for sex. I maintain that it’s male status and dominance signs that do that.
Female Dopers, I still want to hear from you if you’ve ever felt physically attracted to a man who didn’t show some signs of being alpha or top dog, somehow or another. I’m thinking it’s not possible, unless oen or both of you were socially or emotionally maladjusted.
OK, we’re getting somewhere in this discussion. You aren’t denying that instinct plays a part and I’m not denying that culture plays a part.
What I’m saying is that for some reason it’s become unfashionable to point out the instinctive component in the West. Probably because it makes it seem like there are distinct gender roles, which there doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be in modern society.
But let me ask you a question: Why are human males taller and more muscular than human females?
I’m not a female doper, but you can’t be this generalising about it.
Women are attracted to alpha guys sure, but there are other factors that can make a non-alpha attractive. And events can get in the way e.g. Even attractive girls can go through periods of not getting hit on, and then can basically hook up with the first (lucky) guy who shows some interest (and be genuinely attracted to said guy, because he’s effectively the only guy).
But that doesn’t touch my hypothesis. The “only” is top dog in the absence of other dogs.
I still say well-socialized women need men to be top dog—some way, somehow—or there is no attraction.
And I still say you’re overly generalising.
Sheesh, what have we done to scare away the women? I’d love to hear a woman’s two cents on this thread.
And I did think that my point touched your hypothesis. The point is, a girl may be attracted to a guy who she is well aware isn’t head of the company or the best-looking, if, for example she simply befriends the guy.
Of course, then you might say “Well she thinks he’s top dog for personality” but if you go down that road you’re broadening your definition of alpha until eventually it will mean “whatever reason for a woman dating a guy”.
btw though, I don’t disagree with you, just think you need to splash some “usually” and “most” limiters into your hypothesis.
I don’t think you can make too much of a couple of obscure and tiny cultures here and there.
No one ever denied that cultural influence could affect even things that have a physiological basis. But if you find that the overwhelming majority of cultures, and an even more overwhelming majority of people, share an attitude, it’s likely that this has some physiological basis and the minority that don’t are outliers.
I think you need to include realistic expectations in your calculus. A person can be primarily attracted by Aspect A and pair up with someone who has a relatively low score on this attribute if that’s the best he/she can get.
There are a lot of unattractive women who get married. This doesn’t imply that their husbands are not interested in beauty in a mate, or that they are uniquely programmed to find these particular women attractive. Rather, that’s the best they could get so they adjusted their Beauty scales accordingly, and if they were regularly dating model-caliber women they would not find their actual spouses attractive at all.