Well, to begin with, the posters, all of whom I took to be women, described being on the other side of a familiar issue: trying as a male to talk my way into getting sex. When I think about going to an interesting museum with somebody, I am also picturing how it might be interesting to them, and what sharing the experience will be like, but when I think about getting to have sex with somebody, it gets pretty physically goal oriented. I don’t get pushy or devious or insistent or needy about other things in anywhere near the way I do it about sex. There are plenty of clues out there that I’m not the only one. As far as I know we are not organizing and plotting collectively, but the wall of sexual motivation I imagine we are projecting probably looks more like some kind of conspiracy from the other side – and for that matter, since I haven’t thought much about it before, maybe some of my conversation and comparing notes with other men, and reading humor and enjoying movies and all sorts of other things, have accomplished a kind of unconscious organization, or at least fed me lines and taught me expectations. The blogger and many of the posters there seem to be describing several of these mechanisms and undercurrents.
Also, I don’t know how fun sex is for women. I really do believe that sometimes it’s just great. But, the classic cartoon of sexual tension has the man pursuing and the woman holding back, and the only way I can make sense of that is if women just generally don’t see it as the same fun time men do. And I do feel motivated to make sense of it. The way people in that discussion are describing sex, it doesn’t sound like much fun; I never thought the women’s side of it looked that fun either, but I figured maybe that was just my orientation speaking. But what if there’s more to it?
One last point right off the cuff. We humans can all go marching off on our various missions, including in our bag of conventional wisdom that having sex feels fantastic and so we should try to get to do it as often as possible. That used to make a certain kind of sense – supposedly evolution makes sure sex feels fantastic, so that we propagate, and species that hate sex only last one generation. But somewhere around age 45 or 50 or so (I forget), it dawned on me that evolution doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether sex feels fantastic. Evolution only cares if we think it is going to. The people in that discussion seem to be heading to some women’s version of the lifting of the veil, which is different than my version, but which fits together with it. And, lo, male and female are made to fit together after all, but in the sense of getting philosophical about what’s under the veil, and not just the plumbing sense.
And that’s the sorry root at the bottom of all this wonder and amazement. I kinda think that we’ve ALL been sold a bill of goods, and we do a lot of stuff that does accomplish procreation, and all our huge motivation on the subject seems inside us like it’s for us, and we’re chasing our favorite dream, but in fact it’s all for future generations. And we don’t figure this out until years after we’ve become irrelevant to the interests of future generations, and we’re working a few more years and preparing for disbursement from the species.
