A man goes to see his mistress and, because of the day he’s had, has the temerity to complain about bourgeois women and how he hates them and their values.
The mistress, a clever and beautiful Russian, responds by demanding of him why men are such wankers. He gathers that she means this both literally and figuratively, as she explains that all men play with themselves most of the time and that the characteristics he so dislikes are not the fault of middle class women; it is men who have shaped the world to make them as they are. It is men who screw around but want to marry virgins. It is men who let women do all the work and cannot be trusted. It is men who want a whore in the bedroom, a cook and cleaner in the kitchen and the perfect mother for their children – kinder, kirke und kuche as the Germans expressed it. And it is men who have created a world full of conflict and repression. He decides to try to answer her…
Human beings are part of a family of apes which also includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and their closely-related but smaller, much nicer-natured cousins, bonobos.
The key to the answer to the courtesan’s questions is to compare the social arrangements of these six species and understand the relationship between their behaviour and their bodies.
Orangutans share 96.4% of their DNA with humans and had a common ape ancestor 14 million years ago. They are solitary creatures, the male and female of whom meet only for sex and the male of which demonstrates no paternal care, having no role in the upbringing of his children.
Gorillas share 97.7% of human DNA and they and humans had a common ancestor 9 million years.
Despite King Kong, gorillas are less well-endowed than humans, with small penises and testes. This reflects their living arrangements which are those of the harem with the females numbering three to five. Like deer or walruses, male gorillas compete to be the dominant male over a group of females who follow his lead and mate with him alone. As in deer and walruses, the male is therefore significantly larger than the female and the female chooses/is chosen by the male most able to physically dominate other males. It is a world in which a few males mate with many females and other males may never mate at all. Sex is an infrequent reproduction-focussed activity, basically only taking place when one of the females is in a position to have another child.
All of this means that the male doesn’t need to be particularly virile i.e. able to produce large quantities of sperm rapidly, but he does need to be physically large and strong enough to see off his rivals and protect his females. In short, the competition between males for females is about physique and not virility. This means males have to be aggressive creatures but also, crucially, that gorilla social organisation is limited to five or six adults. Large cohesive troops cannot form.
Chimps and bonobos share 98.4% of human DNA and the common ancestor is as recent as 7 million years ago. Both species live in troops and are promiscuous. This means that no chimp or bonobo father knows which is his offspring. There are therefore no specific father-child bonds but equally no lasting pair bonds.
In contrast with the poorly endowed but powerful gorilla, in these species most, perhaps all, males do get to mate. The genetic competition is therefore all about virility: which male’s sperm will actually fertilise the receptive female.
This has a whole series of consequences. It means that physical size and strength are of less significance (though still important because the female will tend to choose dominant, physically fine males likely to provide her with strong, durable offspring) and males and females are not significantly different in size. It also means that the female is doing the choosing. Once she has indicated her availability, males offer themselves and the female selects those with whom she will mate.
In such species the males are competing in terms of virility so it is important that they have large and potent genitalia (EW NOTE: can you have potent genitalia?!?) as he whose sperms gets to the egg first wins! This means larger and more productive penises and testes.
A further difference between gorillas and chimps is female ovulation. In gorillas, there are only slight signs of it for the male to pick up. Among chimpanzees, ovulation and thus the right time for mating are boldly advertised.
Although chimps and bonobos share this much, there are also significant differences. Chimpanzee males are aggressive animals. They are also scheming and manipulative, and seek to deceive and kill others of their own kind. Thus male chimpanzees have been observed to ambush and murder other males and to steal their females. They will also kill the orphaned offspring of females they acquire in order to prepare the way to supplant another male’s genes with their own. (This brutal practice also exists among other non-ape species and is exactly what might be expected of some species in a world where the goal of all creatures is to survive and replicate.)
However, there has to be a trade-off between aggression and co-operation. If males are too aggressive, they will end up being too destructive of their own kind. Thus relative degrees of aggression are also a vital factor in determining the number of individuals that can form a troop. The less aggressive and more co-operative the species, the larger the number of animals that can form a single unit.
Chimpanzee aggression means that troop size has to remain small. This leads us to the bonobo. They are relatively small, child-like variants of their chimpanzee cousins. Males and females are of similar size, their natures are co-operative and their groups large – up to 50+ animals can form a single troop. In short they are, from a human perspective, appealing and attractive creatures.
Constant and frequent sex in every variation is central to their social organisation. In fact, it performs the vital function of resolving tensions and aggression within the troop. Thus sexual play can take place not only between males and females, but also between males, between females and between adults and children. To use human terminology, bonobos are homosexual, lesbian, paedophile, and, literally, the males in particular are also wankers! It is, as Henry Ford might have said, sheer bunkum to suggest that such behaviour is limited to humans and there is nothing unnatural about any of these practices.
It is also notable that bonobo society is matriarchal. The females control the food and run the troop with males following their mothers around well into adulthood, (if not for life) and the males hanging around the female troop core.
The parallels with humans are striking and are an important clue to drawing conclusions about people.
Human males are, on the gorilla to chimpanzee genitalia scale, of moderate size, somewhere equidistant between the two extremes.
The human female’s genitalia are also interesting by contrast with those of some other species. Human female ovulation is entirely concealed. Women have no visible external genitalia which advertise their availability and receptivity. The human male therefore has no clear signal as to whether the human female is available or not. He must therefore guess, working on the assumption that those females he finds attractive are constantly available if only he can make himself sufficiently appealing. In other words, the human male is effectively programmed to be constantly looking for sex and to be able to perform whenever opportunity arises. His more or less constant search for sex is carried out in competition with other males who also find that female appealing. In principle he is therefore prepared to be violent to other males to win the right to mate with the female(s) he wants. However he knows that the world is far more complex than this. The female may choose not to mate with him precisely because he has thus shown himself to be violent and uncaring – she wants a caring male. There are good reasons for this and, indeed, they go to the heart of the reasons why human males are as they are.
Let us look at the requirements of the human female in her male.
She wants her male to be strong and powerful enough to be able to protect her and her offspring. She wants him to be co-operative and caring enough to cherish her and her offspring and to assist with the mighty burden she faces both of bearing the child – nine months of pregnancy and a difficult birth because of the size of the human head by comparison with the capacity of the human birth canal – followed by at least 15 to 20 years of continuous nurture as she struggles to ensure that her children survive and thrive.
In short, when a woman has sex, the potential consequences last fifteen to twenty years and shape her entire life. For him, by contrast, the sex act can be consequence-free. He can, in principle, have his few moments of pleasure and then wander away, seeking more pleasure elsewhere. Just as her biological role forces her to be a responsible individual, so his allows him to be irresponsible – if he can get away with it.
However, this in turn raises one very specific issue for him.
All women for very obvious reasons know that they are the mother of their children. By contrast, until the advent of DNA testing no man can ever be perfectly certain that he is the father. He can, however, increase the likelihood by restricting the opportunities for the female to mate elsewhere. This can be done by various means: physical restraint such as the chastity belt or imprisoning the woman (and made even more secure if guarded by eunuchs), or cultural means including religious prohibitions such as the Muslim veil backed by penalties for adultery. Worst of all is female genital mutilation (so-called female circumcision), the simple but dreadful expedient of cutting off the female genitalia and stitching the wound tightly to turn intercourse from a pleasurable experience to a painful one which as a consequence she will avoid. This barbaric approach is practiced in over 20 countries. The emphasis on virginity at marriage falls within the same context. It is a means by which paternity can be guaranteed.
All this means that we can begin to see why men are as they are. They want lots of diverse consequence-free sex for themselves but they do not want their woman/women to enjoy the same freedom!
They also want to be able to wander off to have sex elsewhere, leaving the woman to do the hard work draining her time and energy. She has to carry the child(ren) both literally and figuratively. She has to ensure she and they are fed. She has to provide a home which offers them protection and, preferably, comfort.
In short she has loads to do and sex is not the priority for her it is for him except in the context of retaining his services! For, noting his promiscuous nature and assuming she wants to keep him, she can only do this by making herself if not continuously then at least regularly available to him.
Doing so is, however, only one of the many demands upon her limited time and energy. So, for her sex is a priority for that reason. Evolution is essentially a practical mechanism which delivers utility. In the context of these interests and arrangements, it is highly useful if the human female also experiences sexual pleasure directly. It is therefore useful if she has her own organ of sexual pleasure – the clitoris – a body part which, like all of them, is an appendage which only exists in the first place because it serves a useful evolutionary function and which only continues to exist over many generations, that is does not atrophy, by remaining useful.
We begin in all this to see some of the characteristic patterns of human male and female behaviour.
The female is selective about when and with whom she has sex. The more in demand she is, in principle the more selective she can be, though this of course is a function of her circumstances. Thus a beautiful and clever women may nonetheless be in sufficiently difficult practical circumstances – be sufficiently needy – to necessitate her having sex with partners she would not otherwise consider.
If he is to get the sex he wants the male will provide the degree of support/service she indicates is necessary for him to remain in her good graces but if he feels the price has become too high i.e. she wants too much of him, he can always pursue other alternatives: find another partner, have sex with a man or even, an animal or pleasure himself i.e. be a wanker (in terms of the effort to satisfaction ratio, the simplest, cheapest most easily available option though perhaps the least satisfying!)
Let us now turn to what makes females attractive to males and vice versa. As a starting point both want the same thing: a partner of sufficient quality that any offspring will be strong, vigorous and themselves likely to breed. Beauty is a shorthand form by which one human sees and recognises these characteristics in another which is why concepts of beauty in the form of symmetry, certain mathematical ratios and purity of form are universal, notwithstanding that the specific features which particular people find attractive may vary.
However, humans also prize intelligence. This is for the very practical reason that, in general terms, the more intelligent a person is, the better their survival prospects, life chances and likelihood of successfully reproducing: it’s a survival adaptation which explains why in principle we all want the most beautiful and intelligent partner we can have.
It is generally recognised that men prize beauty more than brains whereas women do the reverse. Their respective biological roles suggest why this should be so. For the woman who has a degree of dependence on her mate, intelligence increases the likelihood that he will be able to deliver the many forms of help and service she needs. Physical beauty is less relevant to this practical long-term agenda.
By contrast, the male agenda is potentially one of instant gratification. In many cases, his time-frame is essentially about two minutes. Because he can “love her and leave her”, her intelligence is far less important than her immediate physical appeal. In other words, the cliché is both accurate and has a precise evolutionary explanation.
Modern thinking about evolution attaches importance to the role of sexual selection both in progressively increasing human intelligence and in the consequences for that intelligence of the mechanism.
Intelligence is a human equivalent of the peacock’s tail. It has been created by sexual selection for a particular characteristic. What does not follow is that the human brain is in any sense equivalent to the bright and gaudy plumage of the peacock by contrast with the dowdiness of the peahen. This cannot be the case because the way characteristics are inherited means that it is impossible for male brains to evolve to higher levels of intelligence without female brains doing exactly the same thing. Both males and females will evolve larger more powerful brains at the same rate.
They may not, however, evolve in an identical way because selection pressures are subtly different. The male is evolving a brain designed to display his intelligence to the female whom he hopes will choose him as a mate as a result of this display. She, by contrast is evolving a brain designed to appreciate intelligence as this ability is crucial to her mate selection in the context of the simple, fundamental fact that the man offers and the woman chooses in all circumstances outside of rape.
There are, of course, other selection pressures. Among these are the respective roles within the troop organisation. Women have to be able to perform multiple tasks at the same time. The simplest and most necessary is the ability to do two things at once in the form of keeping an eye on their children whilst obtaining food. Men by contrast need to be able concentrate very specifically on one task if that task involves hunting and or coping with predators, including other males, where their life is at risk.
One would expect therefore female and male brains to be equal but different. It is now recognised that they are and that the female brain enjoys certain advantages amidst the pace and multi-tasking complexity of modern civilised life. Women really can do two or more things at once in the way men can’t. In fact, one can go further. Recent scans of the human brain suggest that the neural links between the two brain hemispheres are stronger and more numerous in women’s brains than men’s. Because these links are connected with socialisation and learning difficulties this helps to account for the greater frequency of problems of autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia in men. It also probably suggests that female intuition really does exist by contrast with its absence in the male. It is the ability to see the complete picture and its ramifications with a speed and understanding that the somewhat more laborious male brain takes longer to match, if it can do so at all!
In summary we have pretty much arrived at the mistress’s male: a wanker both literally and figuratively; an individual who wants to screw around but marry a virgin, who woos but thereafter lets women do all the work and cannot be trusted; who wants a whore in the bedroom, a cook and cleaner in the kitchen and the perfect mother for their children while restricting her in ways designed to guarantee they are his own.
But this essay began with the assertion that for the first time ever, there were fundamental changes in both male/female relations and by implication in morality. This is the result of technology: the fact that for the first time ever, women are able reliably to control their own fertility and have as many or as few children as they wish when they wish.
Combined with modern economic productivity and the standard of living and leisure time which it allows, all of this enables the modern woman to be the architect of her own life, free of the endless, physically-draining cycle of pregnancy, birth, lactation and pregnancy again – without this involving celibacy. She is now able to share the attributes of the male, to enjoy sex, not worry about the consequences, wander off and have it elsewhere with someone else.
This enables much of the traditional rulebooks, the sexual laws imposed by religions and societies, to be junked. That is a true liberation – but only as yet for those women with free access to contraception and with the education and intelligence to recognise that what was taught to them as eternal truths are in fact merely the man-made codes created by society for its own convenience to prevent the economically and socially inconvenient consequences of her promiscuity (but not his).
With those codes can go so much that is limiting and restricting of women behaviourally and culturally: the Madonna/whore false dichotomy which were essentially the only role models offered by Christianity, the woman-hating hypocrisies of Sharia law, the bride price and suttee of Hinduism, the foot-binding of Confucian China, the female circumcision referred to earlier …..
There is, however one further vital point. This is liberation not only for women but also for the intelligent male. For the first time it allows the woman to make choices which allow her to be herself, therefore allowing him to enjoy his mate for the first time as herself – in all her glorious difference from slower-witted him, following his prick and stuck with his one idea at a time!
Tony Brown
July 2009
Posted in Sexuality
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