Ask A Genius 115 – Sex as Tragedy
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/12
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Rick Rosner: Sex as tragedy, I was thinking about how sex makes a lot of people dicks, mostly guys. That took me back to a few years ago when I read a science fiction story that took me back to a couple years ago when I read a science fiction story that presents a humanoid species, but somewhat different than humans because childhood is a time of innocent joy. But then when you enter puberty or adulthood, everything sucks.
You get dumber, body hurts, sex is brutal, and adulthood is a bummer and unavoidable. All of the adults walk around under this cloud of life sucking because of their horrible biology. Then I was thinking of how this relates to humans, and I was thinking of how sex is a tragedy. When you’re a child, you’re relatively free of sex drive. Sex drives for the most part. Though in today’s culture, you can’t really avoid it.
I was early seeing porn and everything, but I didn’t see a boner, probably, until, at least, nowhere other than myself—took until 7th or 8th grade. I couldn’t imagine being a kid today and not seeing one on the Internet by accident. Anyway, let’s imagine childhood is an innocent time of joy, but then when puberty hit and sex starts. You’re working for the sex man. It’s not a good deal. Sex makes people into douches.
It doesn’t make people into douches, but it encourages a lot of people’s douchery to come out.
S: You opened this with men as guiltier of ‘douchebagginess’ or ‘dickiness’ than women.
R: Yea, because, I mean, it goes back to sociobiology: sperm cheap, eggs expensive. Guys can spray their schplooky every place, and can be reasonably happy; whereas, women have a different psychology. Under, I don’t know, stereotypical conditions, but, I mean, women are subject to sex and gender-related and romantic related horriblenesses of their own. Sad relationships stuff. It is mostly not dickishness in women. It is maybe stereotypically romantic delusion.
In any case, both men and women, when puberty hits, you’re working for the sex man and the sex woman. It’s a miserable job. It makes some people into turds. It makes a lot of people miserable. That it in itself is tragic. We have to work for peepee and vagina stuff because that’s what drives us because of evolution, and having to reproduce to carry on the species.
S: If I may interject, do these cultural values—that emerge from the same sociobiology, but played out in groups, that are tied to individual men and individual women that have these proclivities that are based in evolutionary pressures and genetic makeup—reinforce what some would see as stereotypes of men as aggressors and women as victims?
R: Yea, it is hard to separate cultural norms from biological drives. So yea, what we’ve been talking about is to some extent stereotypical, and so making me a little bit of a douche myself for stereotyping men and women, it’s not like I’m talking entirely out of my butt. I’m not the first person to notice sex differences, gender differences, in approaches to sex.
S: What would you say to those who say that’s not true?
R: Come on, I would say, “Come on.” If you’re going to do—there was a thing at my old university that was the human—this room of thousands of studies of comparative human behavior across all of the various cultures in the world. I forget the name of the room. If you do statistical studies of how people are, I’m sure you could find various loan cultures where you could probably find a matriarchy where women are the sexual aggressors and are closer to, or have what we think of, guy-like behavior.
If you do the statistical deal, I’m sure that you’ll find that, on a statistical basis, men are more rapey than women. The feminist analysis of sociobiology would probably—I don’t know—say, I am guessing, sociobiology is justifying male aggression by putting it in a pseudo-biological frame. Maybe, that is true to some extent, but it doesn’t avoid the deal that it crosses more cultures than any other way around men are more rapey.
S: Does this then beg the question when someone says, “The social and cultural pressures on men or women to behave in certain ways makes them behave in certain ways as a statistical tendency, if they were to use the same level analysis that you’re pointing out.”
[Break in the recording]
R: Sex isn’t that much of a tragedy. Most of the people who—I suspect many and probably most of the people who turn into horrible people once their sex drive kicks in were probably already horrible people.
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