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| Image source unknown. |
Why do we have such a problem with “slut” shaming?
Why are women expected to wait for someone to approach them about
sex? Why do all too many women expect a knight in shining armor to
rescue them from the ivory tower? Why do we feel guilty for our
sexual urges? There are many various attitudes toward the subject of
sex. Unfortunately, the more common ones are detrimental to
individual health and happiness. Of those, many are even a handicap
to society, and more importantly to the individual. As I had written
in my previous essay on this subject – Sex; Attitude and
Greatness, back in 2012, a very large part of sex boils down to
attitudes. The reality is that sex is mostly mental, and only partly
physical. Of course, that's not to ignore, exactly, the physical part
of it, without which sex wouldn't be possible. But, even touching,
kissing, etcetera are stimulation of nerve endings, which send
signals up the nervous system to the brain, where the action is
interpreted and understood. In that way, even the physical is largely
mental. My point here, however, is about how we think of sex. We all
have some expectations, some preferences and desires, we even have
beliefs outside of sex that influence how we think of sex. More
importantly, these attitudes and beliefs all affect our enjoyment of
sex.
Some people might disagree with me about what I'm about
to say, mostly the religious, I'm sure. If there's anything that is
universally true about sex it's this – sex is natural and one of
the most beautiful experiences of life. In fact, we could say life is
ultimately all about sex, after all, most organisms struggle to
survive long enough to reproduce. It's almost as if that is it the
point of life. Worse still, for most organisms this struggle is
paramount and not enjoyed, rather it's only the fulfillment of an
undeniable instinct. Sex is ultimately an endless fight for survival.
It is a fight, first for the organism, to obtain a mating partner.
This often leads to fights between two or more competing animals,
like rams locking horns to determine a winner. Those rams are not
just trying to win the battle, they're trying to win the mating
partner. This is part of the process of evolution. Nearly everyone
has heard of – and most people understand – natural selection,
the process in which as creatures evolve the traits that don't hinder
an animal's survival can be passed on to the next generation if it
reproduces. But, the male peacock's elaborate and beautiful tail
patterns, just like the ram's horns and ability to win the fight with
other rams, is sexual selection. In the process of sexual selection
the evolution is driven by development of traits that make an animal
more attractive to potential mating partners. The male peacock's tail
feather patterns serve no function to help it survive, but they do
help it obtain female peacocks to have sex with, and thus produce
young peacocks with his genetics. The ram's horns are not
particularly useful for his daily survival either, he doesn't use
them to get food, and most likely doesn't use those horns to defend
against predators. The ram's horns more-or-less only help it to win
the fight for dominance for the sole purpose of mating. Just a little
aside – sexual selection and natural selection are not mutually
exclusive forces in the process of evolution. I thought I'd add that
point in case anyone did not already know, we all know there are too
many misconceptions out there.
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| Images of ancient fertility goddesses, sources unknown. |
But don't think that evolution, or nature, is sexist
because females often also develop traits that help them obtain
mates. Nature often favors in the females greater ability to produce
offspring or to provide for them. So, while it may not seem as
obvious when we look at the various species, sexual selection does
happen in females too. If a female can produce numerous offspring the
species is more likely to survive. If the female can be more attached
to her young, the species has a better chance at being continued
because the young have a better chance at achieving sexual maturity
thanks to mother's help is surviving to adulthood. This means that
female forms often have been selected by males for what seems to be a
greater ability to raise young to maturity or produce more young. In
human females, for example, broader hips are instinctively perceived
as a desirable trait. People have even demonstrated an intuition
regarding a woman's hip and sexual selection when they say: “That
woman has child-bearing hips!” Likewise, the breasts of human
women has evolved do to sexual selective pressures, since the
roundness of the buttocks has become less obvious and constantly
displayed when we began walking upright, the breasts began becoming
bigger and rounder and more noticeable. While the butt is visible
from behind, it's not visible from the front – where it happens
that the breasts are to be found. When males have a choice in mates,
a female with the traits that seem most desirable is most likely to
get a mate. While sexual selection is usually geared toward greater
strength and ability to survive in males, in females it's usually
geared toward greater ability to reproduce and care for the young.
Either way, all species select for the best chances that the species
will long endure.
The process of evolution has long been at work in
humans, as well. And sexual selection has also been a very potent
influence on humanity, even to this day. One example is the average
size of the human penis. Over a very long time, millions of years in
the transitional species from which humans evolved, and in humans for
around one hundred fifty thousand years, females have chosen to mate
with males who had more desirable penises. So, straight ladies,
whatever your thought about human penises you can thank, or blame,
your ancient women ancestors. But, males have also influenced the
evolution of the female human body. Broader hips have long
psychologically suggested a greater ability to birth children. Broad
hips have long been seen by many ancient men as a sign of fertility.
It's true that breasts on women evolved in part because the round
rump, which is seen in many mammalian species as a sort of sexual
lure for males, are not as clearly visible when the female is seen
from the front because we walk upright, but there's another possible
not-mutually-exclusive reason. Larger breasts have long been seen by
our ancient male ancestors as a sign of a woman's greater ability to
nourish children. And, obviously, well-nourished children have a
greater chance of growing up to be healthy adults who can pass the
family genes on to another generation. Men have preferred these
features over such a long time that the average woman's body is
shaped as it is now. Psychology is a science that can help us better
understand sex, and not just in understanding how humans have evolved
due to sexual selection.
In all these things about us humans, psychology explores
us and explains us. A few things follow here as an example. Women
have long found a man's wealth to be key factor in determining his
attractiveness, though most claim otherwise. It does make sense that
historically there's been an evolutionary reason for this. A partner
who can provide for the children will, naturally, mean children who
will grow up healthier and be able to continue the species. However,
things have changed. Women in many societies around the globe now
work. And many of them are able to provide for their children without
relying on a man's wallet. The man's wealth is becoming less valid as
a factor for attraction. Likewise, starting with the harvesting of
milk from cows and sheep and continuing with the invention of baby
formula, a woman's breast size has been less valid as a factor for
determining a woman's attractiveness. The fact is that we carry many
legacies of our evolution in our current attitudes about sex. Much of
these attitudes are have outlived their usefulness to the species. Of
these outdated attitudes, some are harmless, but some are really
quite detrimental.
Puritanical views have long perverted and permeated
American views on sex, and to a lesser degree much of western views,
as well. Pervasive in western culture is the Christian view that sex
is not beautiful, but rather “sinful” and “dirty”
– and much of this is true of Islam, as well. The idea that sex is
some kind of disgusting thing that should only be done in the context
of marriage is traditional among the most conservative of people. Why
should this be? Because, the archaic view expressed by the early
fathers of Christianity is that sex only exists to cause there to be
more Christian souls to go out and dominate the globe. This is also
true of most religions. Today religions continue to dominate our
culture with their self-serving beliefs about controlling people,
with unnecessary shame and guilt and fear. Now, one might think that
promoting promiscuous sex would have been more effective at enlarging
the ranks of the religious, but they had a reason against that. They
wanted to make sure that the children were ensured to be members of
the particular religion. If the children were born to unwed parents
the children could be taken to any church or any religion. It served
the religion's need to control its members and and to grow the
religion's numbers, but there was another reason for sex being
limited to marriage only. It actually mattered in terms of
inheritance and family lines. Such restrictions were meant to ensure
that a man's property would be inherited by his actual child rather
than some other man's child. With a marriage, there was a recognized
social contract between the man and woman involved, and it meant that
there was a legal setting for the estate distribution. Again, today
these things are less relevant. With the invention of DNA testing we
can now conclusively prove a child's parents, further a person can
choose to leave his or her estate to anyone or any group named in a
legally-binding document called a will. The religious reasoning is
something that can't be justified in the modern era.
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| Image source unknown. |
Monogamy is not natural, exactly. It's true that for the
survival of our species, since children require around 15 years to
reach maturity pair-bonding of the parents served this interest. We
evolved to form family units in which the father and mother
cooperated to provide for and protect the young. I say fifteen years,
but that's arguable, give or take a few years. The point is that it
takes many years before a young human would be able to survive
without parents taking care of him or her. Still, we evolved
societies into which we live for all our lives, and which continue
the benefits we gained as a child from having parents and family
working together. But, at odds with this pair-bonding trait we
evolved is another evolutionary trait found in both men and women.
This is a trait that is so powerful that it's the underlying force
making marital infidelity actually a fairly common occurrence. In
males, of most species, the ability to spread the genetic code to
create as many offspring as possible has been a great force in
ensuring the survival of a species. Ours is no exception to that
fact. In females, particularly in humans, there evolved a tendency to
find a mate to bond with who can provide well, but to seek to
reproduce with other males who have more desirable physical traits. A
woman is predisposed biologically, by evolution, to settle down with
the man who has wealth, but to have affairs with men who seem to be
more fit and healthy. In either case, our species evolutionary legacy
is conflicted and neither trait is ethically better or worse than the
other. These just are the facts about our evolution and our nature.
So, this leads to a problem. How do we reconcile our enlightenment
and our nature to best suit ourselves? As long as we deny our nature
we will find ourselves less happy and healthy than we can and ought
to be.
The
fact that there are women who want to silently suffer a mediocre
experience is saddening and ultimately self-destructive. The idea of
putting up with not getting the most out of sex because of not
wanting to disappoint will backfire. It's true that many younger
people, with their tremendous amounts of inexperience, are more prone
to not communicate properly, but they need to be encouraged to
communicate. Fundamentally, by trying to please one's partner by not
offering instruction and not communicating, one is building
resentment and frustration in oneself and one's partner. Also, when
one discovers one's partner has not been fully engaged it most
certainly is a serious disappointment and ruins the experience. By
doing this, some women are causing two people to become resentful of
the woman in question, herself and her partner. The
notion of quietly accepting poor performance needs to be put to an
end. Though it may be true of some men, it is almost exclusively, in
this issue, women causing their own problem. I believe this condition
is largely due to archaic notions that still afflict us. Even today,
popular culture suggests women are supposed to be submissive and to
use sex as a tool instead of enjoying it for their own pleasure. So
many socializing forces, such as many women's magazines and romance
movies and fairy-tales still perpetuate the destructive narrative and
bad advice.
If women try experimenting with themselves, and then
have completely honest and straightforward talks with their partners
about what works for them, then sex would likely be far more
enjoyable for most. It seems that many women have some kind of
hang-up about both masturbating and about communicating with their
partners. That's not to say that there aren't guys who don't listen,
of course there are, but there's also no reason for a woman to assume
that sex can't be great, or better. Most guys really do want to
satisfy their partners, and no one is a mind-reader. In fact, no one,
of either gender, is a mind-reader. No one can know things that are
not told to them. And, it is unreasonable and inexcusable to continue
to behave as if it's fair to expect people to be more than who and
what they are. It's unjust to think that one's partner should live up
to and perform like the fantasies that have been implanted by
corporate interests like Hollywood and molded by corrupt influences
like the Puritan church of hundreds of years ago. I believe it is
high-time we as a species move into the modern era – we need to
evolve out of the stagnate cesspit of the out-dated misconceptions.
This is only going to happen as we continue to challenge the
standard, and help to enlighten others.
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| Image Copyright 2015 by Joshua Michail. |
Sex is the most beautiful thing people can do with each
other, intimately. Sex, however, is not love. Love and sex can and do
often go together, but one ought not to confuse these two separate
things. Many people believe that sex with someone they love is
beautiful, and they're not wrong, but sex is beautiful even without
love. In a way, sex gets a bad rap on that regard, because many
people ignore the fact that love is separate from sex. But, I blame
religion for that, and many more mental handicaps. Religion must be
expelled from the bed sheets. The single greatest toxin to humanity
and to sex is religion. The fact that people feel guilt for doing and
enjoying a natural and beautiful thing is something that religion
alone has foisted upon us. If we are half as wise as we like to think
our species to be, we must change our ways. We can no longer afford
to pretend that we are not what we are. Our concepts of marriage
romantic relationships must change, we ought to embrace our nature.
We can, of course continue to marry the ones we love, but we should
expect and embrace the fact that sex is not and never has been and
never will be confined to marriage. We must accept that we could
forge a new model, the family remains, but why not have multiple
wives for each man and multiple husbands for each woman? Why not
accept polyamory? After all, not only do we naturally desire more
than one partner for the rest of our lives, in regards to sex, but we
are perfectly capable of loving more than one partner at the same
time. We must also embrace the rights of women to be equal to men,
including in their sex lives. Why should we look upon a woman who
enjoys sex as someone to be shamed? It's a shame on us if we continue
this “slut shaming”. We must not interfere with women as they
pursue their sexual satisfaction as they see fit, and embrace the
happiness this brings not only those women, but also ourselves as a
society. We must shed the severe hindrances that make life less
happy.
Copyright
© 2015, by Joshua Michail
All Rights Reserved.
