Danimal archive, part 7

Evolution by mutation and natural selection works very slowly. Evolution by artificial selection works much faster. In the last 15,000 or so years, artificial selection has produced hundreds of distinct breeds of dogs, whereas wild dogs have hardly changed at all.

Since humans are the product of natural selection rather than artificial selection, our DNA has barely changed in the past 15,000 years. The women of today, therefore, have emotional brains (and the resulting mating strategies) optimized for reproductive success in the Pleistocene. The modern woman instinctively wants a guy who has what it takes to survive as a cave man.

Back then, life was tough. If a man wasn't strong and healthy, it didn't matter how smart he was. There wasn't much technology around for a smart brain to work with. Weak guys didn't survive long enough to compete. Strength was a non-negotiable requirement. After that, brains determined the final pecking order. A smart strong guy could usually beat a dull strong guy.

In surviving stone-age cultures, usually the chief or headman of the tribe (who gets more wives than the subordinate males) is the guy with the best combination of strength and smarts. Something like a modern football quarterback, who has to be strong to play the game and withstand the hits, smart enough to learn the complex playbook, and socially dominant to gain the respect and obedience of his team.

Sexy girls are in fact "into a guy's brains," as you can easily demonstrate by noting how most women quickly reject actual retards. A man needs some minimum amount of intelligence to appeal to women, but women don't seem to place a high premium on exceptionally high intelligence which exceeds the minimum requirement. Unless a man makes it amount to something that the female emotional brain can recognize as being relevant.

This isn't too hard to make sense of, when you consider that even as recently as 150 years ago, most people survived by working on farms, using minimal amounts of technology that the average person could master without much "book larnin'." A smart strong farmer was usually more successful than a stupid strong farmer, but a weak smart farmer would have been worthless unless he could persuade strong stupid farmers to do the work for him.

Back then, for example, having the ability to program computers wasn't much good, because there weren't any computers yet. Even today, the ability to program computers is usually so specialized, and so slow to begin with, that it doesn't have the kind of everyday value that really makes a huge difference in a person's life. A programmer, when he is off the clock, might not live that much differently than a busboy off the clock.

At least in adolescence, where the most important mating decisions are made, and where the decision-making is most instinctive (not yet modified by much life experience), the Pleistocene mating strategy of girls severely devalues physically effete boys. The stereotypical nerd who lacks physical prowess and social dominance is not instinctively recognizable to girls as a good reproductive bet. For the nerd to have a chance, he must first produce something with his intelligence, for example by becoming a rock star, or by starting a successful company and getting rich. Unfortunately for the nerds, it can take years and years of hard, tedious work to gain the kind of social status recognizable to female emotional brains through intellectual effort alone.

Like every other person, I have whatever rights the powerful people in my culture allow me to have.

I don't think it is politically possible in the present-day USA to give men the same abortion rights enjoyed by women. The woman holds the trump card: she doesn't have to abort, and by not aborting, she is able to create a hostage situation, and prey upon the compassion of society. Given that society is not going to let that baby starve under any circumstances, society would rather stick the father with the bill. Society gets to satisfy its need to feel compassionate, and the beauty of it is society gets to be compassionate with someone else's money.

Here's a clue for the factually impaired: the way to win every Usenet debate is to take the side supported by the facts. "Facts" are statements of truth which all sane people can recognize as being undeniably true. A sane person only disagrees with a fact by being unaware of the overwhelming evidence for it, making it relatively easy to bring that person around by presenting said evidence.

Of course very few claims have sufficient supporting evidence to rise to the level of "fact." And furthermore, almost everybody believes many things which are not facts, with the result that almost everybody fails to convince everyone else to agree with everything they believe.

If you believe something, and you can't convince someone else of it (someone who seems sane enough to function in the world without continuous custodial care), or at least get your opponent to concede that you make some solid points that he can't really refute (even if his emotional beliefs do not change, because he has rejected fact as the basis for belief), then you have to ask yourself whether your beliefs are indeed factual.

If you suck at Usenet debates, never even tripping up your opponents in the least, nor giving them temporary pause, nor squeezing out a grudging admission that you have a point, nor cornering them into declaring "No matter what you say, you won't convince me" (an outright admission of rejecting facts as the basis for belief), then your beliefs probably aren't factual. That means your beliefs either contradict the facts, or you aren't aware of such facts as may happen to support your beliefs.

Freaks need to "know their place" in the sense of understanding it is not up to them to pass judgement on themselves. Reality will judge them.

If the context is ideas, when ideas confront reality (as every idea must eventually), some ideas will work, and some will fail. Actually the vast majority of ideas will fail. For every Newton, Darwin, or Einstein whose freakish ideas actually worked better than any previously existing ideas, there will be millions upon millions of deranged cranks whose freakish ideas work poorly, or not at all.

Society generally focuses on winners rather than losers. For example, I just read an article about the Miss USA winner. Miguel will be pleased to learn she's from Kentucky. I did not read 49 articles on the 49 contestants who lost, not to mention thousands of articles on the contestants who lost their state competitions.

Thousands of young women, many of whom are probably attractive, and were probably told by lots of people they had a shot, tried to become Miss USA. But there was only one slot open.

The number of ways to succeed is tiny compared to the number of ways to fail.

It may come as a shock to the self-absorbed, but the rest of the world tends to care more about facts than about how some distant stranger happens to be feeling at the moment.

More importantly, where would we be if there hadn't been any selection? For example, what if the government subsidized every business so none could ever fail? Then all the stupid ideas and poorly run businesses would persist, and waste all the resources. Market economies are strong because they severely punish the vast majority of their original thinkers, by allowing most businesses to fail.

I was writing about pretty much every man. You don't have to take my word for it: just watch any old geezer's reaction when a slender, attractive 20-something woman slinks by in revealing garb.

Or, turn on the television and notice the unusual concentration of attractive young women in so many roles. Women who are for the most part far more attractive than the typical women in real life they are supposedly depicting (such as lawyers, cops, etc.). TV producers load up their shows with unusually good-looking people (women, and men as well) because the vast majority of people are highly superficial in the sense that most of us would rather watch people who look good than people who look like crap.

If you'd like to try losing a large fortune, try starting a new television channel that presents actors who accurately reflect what people look like in the real world. You might be able to get away with it for a sitcom or two. Maybe even a respected news show like 60 Minutes. But for most dramas and newscasts etc., forget it.

There are lots of ways to be superficial. Since I have a Y chromosome, I happen to be superficial when it comes to enjoying the decorative value of the tiny minority of well-constructed women.

However, there are solid sociobiological arguments suggesting the normal pattern of male sexual response is not so "superficial" as it appears. A woman's physical appearance has very deep implications for a man's prospects of long-term genetic survival. Some evolutionists have gone so far as to speculate that one human emotional brain---shaped by millions of years of evolution---may actually be smarter than all the conscious reasoning capacity of humans combined.

It is perhaps a pity that your superficial reaction to the apparent superficiality of the normal male libido will likely rob you of any chance to enjoy such deep understanding---but hey, whatever rubs your Buddha. Maybe you prefer to go through life thinking superficially, remaining blissfully unaware of why people do what they do.

In other ways, I am very much not superficial. For example, as far as my need for home decor goes, I am less superficial than any woman I have met so far. As long as I have the functional items around that I value, I don't care what my house looks like. I'm just indifferent to it.

If people want to judge me according to how I (don't) decorate, that's fine with me. People can judge me according to any criteria they like.

Funny, I've always noticed that the least impressive people shout the loudest about how much they don't care what other people think.

Attractive women may be more confident in their sexuality, but that hardly makes them easier, because they have to reject dozens of men for every one they can entertain.

A woman who gets hit on by 500 men per year isn't going to sleep with all 500 of them. At most she might sleep with 5 or 10 of them, and she has to be very selective. If she perceives the slightest flaw with a man or his approach, she rejects him instantly. Don't take my word for it, just try hitting on some hot chicks.

A fat chick who gets asked out once or twice per year isn't going to reject 10 guys in a row. Then she would have no action for 5 or 10 years. She can't afford to be that selective. She'll give almost any guy who talks to her a good listen.

Personally, I don't understand "hogging," because I don't know how a man can function sexually with an obese woman. Even if a man can function with an obese woman, I'm not sure how the idea to do it ever crosses his mind---I don't think it would ever occur to me to try, much like I would never think of attempting to have sex with say, a houseplant, even if it were possible. Unlike women, men have to be highly aroused to have sex. I can only surmise that men who do have sex with obese women must feel some degree of attraction for them. Maybe they are embarrassed about it, and they feel that by humiliating and disrespecting their "hogs" they maintain their "cred" or whatever. That's pretty sad. People should just be honest with themselves and worry less about trying to impress their peers.

I guess it's like gay men who are on the "down low" and are ashamed to admit what they are.

There are some aspects of hogging that are pretty funny, although not to the hogs themselves, most likely. Such as the story about the baseball player who holds the superstition that he can break out of a hitting slump by picking up the fattest, ugliest woman he can find at a bar and having sex with her.

In a twisted sense, this is similar to other feats of strength, endurance, or toughness that men do for flimsy reasons or no real reasons, such as running ultra-marathons, trying to be the first to scale some mountain that killed the previous 20 guys, or seeing how cold they can keep their house in winter. Men will have some respect for other men who do difficult, unnecessary things, whereas to most women, these feats of endurance will usually seem pointless, unless they bring great rewards of fame, money, or some other objective payoff with resource relevance.

Actually I would say that most of what women do to attract men is unintentional. Women feel direct instinctive urges to decorate themselves, even if they make no conscious association for attracting men.

It's similar to the way men feel automatic, instinctive urges to compete with other men. When men feel they have to beat other men in some trivial irrelevant competition, it's not because they consciously believe this will make them more attractive to women. But a man who wins the big meaningful competitions against large numbers of men will certainly be rewarded with his choice of women.

In other words, the average woman feels instinctive urges to check and enhance her appearance, as if she were Halle Berry or some other great beauty whose appearance is a matter of great importance.

Similarly, the average man wants to win pointless competitions with his obscure male peers as if he is Peyton Manning trying to get to the Super Bowl. For example, when I am on a bike ride with some friends, and someone challenges me on a hill climb, I will endure considerable pain to match or exceed his pace to the top, as long as the contest is close enough that I have a shot. It is pointless, but in a way it is fun. It is very difficult for me to let someone ride away when I have the ability to keep up, even if keeping up is painful.

In both cases, the instinctive behavior is there to ultimately increase our mating opportunities with the opposite sex, even if we aren't consciously aware of why we are doing it.

A woman automatically cares about her appearance, and a man automatically cares about competing, even if we don't consciously know why we care. We care because ultimately that's what the opposite sex wants in a mate. Men want women who keep up their looks, and women want men who can kick other men's butts and hog the resources.

Why do you deny the obvious? Do you think there is something wrong with catering to the expectations of others? Other people have a huge influence on how much you can enjoy your life, so it is perfectly reasonable to consider how they view you.

If your whole society despises and rejects you, your life will probably be a horror. Conversely, if you are popular and most people like you, your life will probably be good (unless maybe you have some terrible medical condition that causes unrelenting pain).

It's hilarious that most people are deeply concerned about what others think of them, and yet at the same time most people stridently deny this.

The sexual market influences the choices available to us, according to the efficiency of the sexual market.

Consider the housing market. The price you have to pay for a given type of house, at a given location, reflects the overall supply and demand. The houses available to you are a function of what all the competing buyers want, and how much money they have to spend. You don't have to look at all the houses to feel the effects of what everybody is doing.

Basically, if you have X dollars to spend, you can only select from houses that have been rejected by buyers in your area who have more than X dollars to spend---because any of them can outbid you for any house they want. Thus you must settle for a house the richer buyers consider less desirable.

Conversely, you generally don't have to worry about someone with less than X dollars beating you out for the house you want.

The housing market is highly efficient because there are professional real estate agents and appraisers telling everybody how much each house is worth. In the sexual market, people may have distorted views of their attractiveness (sexual value) to others, but everyone has a pretty accurate view of what they themselves find attractive in others.

Because most men want similar things in a woman, and most women want similar things in a man, each gender rank-orders the other gender in terms of overall desirability. Individual rankings may differ slightly, but most people agree on the general trend. For example, it is very unlikely that one woman would rank a man at the bottom of her attractiveness scale, and another woman would rank him at the top. With men, the rankings are even more similar from man to man. A woman like Heidi Klum is close to being universally attractive to straight men. And not just attractive, but intensely attractive. Her looks are like Bill Gates' money: her looks put her at the top of the sexual market, like Bill Gates' money puts him at the top of the economic market.

Anyway, getting back to the original point: even though you cannot meet and evaluate 6 billion people, the overall sexual market (which reflects the choices, preferences, and opportunities of all those 6 billion people) shapes the choices available to you. Just as the kind of house you buy depends on what everybody else is buying.

Does attaching a pejorative label to something eliminate its impact? Life would be so much simpler if we could solve problems merely by disdaining them.

Are you saying all the men you date would be just as happy to pick up 90-year-old women at a nursing home? If they don't care about age in the superficial sense, they should be just as likely to find women of any age attractive.

Here's what is most likely: the men you date care about a woman's looks---intensely; and for the most part, they date the most physically attractive women they can attract.

For example, let's assume you aren't as superficially attractive as the typical Victoria's Secret lingerie model. This means you are very unlikely to date any man who can attract those lingerie models. You can only date men from among the set of men those models reject.

And conversely, if a man is dating you, he is very unlikely to leave you for any woman who is substantially uglier. Women who are uglier are generally no competition for you.

It's similar to the way the job market sorts workers and positions by salary. A person who can earn $100,000/year at one kind of job is unlikely to take another kind of job at just $10,000/year.

Why? Because it's more fun to make $100,000/year than just $10,000/year. Similarly, the better a woman looks, the more fun she is for a man to be with, all else being reasonably equal. One could say that a woman's looks set the upper bound on how much fun she can be for a man. If she has an unpleasant personality, she can fail to realize all of her fun potential; but no matter how wonderful her personality is, she can never be more fun for a man than her looks allow.

Would you take a drug that gave you a strong desire for gay sex?

I suspect the stories of Einstein's mundane incompetence are overblown, and function more as a way to provide false comfort to the stupid.

Ordinary people do plenty of stupid things too. But nobody pays much attention because ordinary people are not famous.

The phenomenon of cognitive stratification means the genius doesn't have to fit in with the rest of society. Without even trying particularly hard, the genius may find himself surrounded by similar people. For example, in the U.S., less than a quarter of adults hold a four-year college degree. But if you hold such a degree, the odds are that most of your closest friends and associates do too, and you might even guess the percentage of degreed adults is much higher than it actually is.

You didn't have to go out of your way to select friends who are like you. The structure of society automatically groups similar people together.

Nobody can be entirely unreasonable and survive long in the real world. For example, a person who rejects the facts about gravity, aerodynamics, etc., and tries to fly like a bird by jumping off a tall building and flapping his arms isn't likely to persist long in that line of flawed reasoning.

Human cultures are wildly diverse. That is why any behavior which is consistent across almost all cultures is likely to be innate, i.e., caused largely by genes.

An example of cultural diversity is language. We can be pretty sure English, for example, is not the product of genes, because humans have cooked up lots of other languages that are very different.

If every culture had independently come up with English, we would suspect it was caused by genes.

Genes appear to have much to do with a young child's ability to learn a native language quickly, but there is no genetic programming for a specific language.

If beauty worked like that, then different societies would have notions of beauty as different as the languages they speak.

But different societies have much the same notion of beauty. For example, no society considers elderly women more beautiful than young women. It just doesn't happen.

A sociobiology book explains rather than justifies.

Well, sure, if we don't learn our standard of beauty by watching TV, then attempts to reprogram our standard of beauty by censoring TV are likely to fail. It's not a question of whether the social engineering efforts are "right" or "wrong" but whether they are likely to have the intended effects.

If the feminist movement promotes policies based on an incorrect knowledge of human behavior, or even an uncertain knowledge, then implementing those policies may not have the desired effect. It might have no effect, or it might backfire.

You can pick apart every argument the fundamentalist took home from church. For example, the claim that only by believing in God is absolute morality possible. You can easily show that believing in God doesn't do the job. For example: suppose you know your neighbor is molesting children. Are you morally obligated to report your neighbor to the police? And would you be sinning if you did not? If the fundamentalist says yes, you are obligated, you point out that God isn't reporting lots of child molesters to the police; we know this because many of them are still at large. Presumably, God knows who all the child molesters are; and God could report them to the police. But he does not. Does God commit a sin of omission? The fundamentalist would probably say no, because God cannot sin.

Therefore, the fundamentalist rejects absolute morality, and he instead believes morality is relative---there are some acts of commission or omission that are sinful for humans, but not sinful for God. What constitutes "sin" is relative to who you are. There is no absolute definition of sin.

If you find yourself growing frustrated by trying to get me to accept your unexamined beliefs, it's either because the facts do not support your beliefs, or you lack the ability to show that they do.

I acknowledge every error I make when someone exposes it. That is why I become progressively more in tune with the facts the longer I live, while you cling to your errors despite the facts and escalate your dishonesty.

I've heard that cats suffer from a variety of illnesses, but no cat has ever suffered from insomnia.

Similarly, fat people have enough illnesses to fill medical books, but you never hear of a fat person losing their appetite.

People do not choose their habits primarily by reasoning about them. Instead, they use reason to excuse their behavior after the fact.

Someone who feels urges to be a slothful glutton may offer various "what's the point" arguments after the fact, but those arguments were probably not what led the slothful glutton to be a slothful glutton in the first place.

In places where public nudity is legal, does anybody give a damn if nude people begin masturbating in public?

Do you see an inherent difference between going nude in public vs. masturbating in public, and if so, what exactly is the difference? The only difference I see, assuming the masturbator avoids littering with bodily secretions, is that many viewers would be more disturbed to see someone masturbating while nude than to see someone nude who is doing some other things.

But humans are molecular machines. All social ails and injustice reduce, at some level, to chemistry. Drugs are tools for pushing molecules around. At the moment, they aren't very precise tools, but today's drugs are better than what was available 100 years ago, and barring the collapse of civilization, it seems safe to predict tomorrow's drugs will be better still.

I don't know if a solution to every social ail is possible (there may be Darwinian/Malthusian arguments suggesting otherwise), but if all you want to do is bring one person up to the level of behavior already exhibited by another person, it's merely a question of rearranging a lot of molecules in the person you judge to be defective.

For example, there are lots of people who, while far from perfect, manage to go about their business, be reasonably productive, and stay mostly out of trouble.

Then there are other people who pretty much screw up for much of their lives, constantly in trouble with the law, unable to manage their money, creating costs and problems for people around them, etc.

When science determines exactly what is different between the productive people and the screw-ups, perhaps technologists can find a way to push molecules around to bring the screw-ups to a basic level of competence. And then the whole world can be about as "nice" as what we call a "nice neighborhood" today.

I'm not talking about making everyone perfect, just making everyone as good as the best people who now exist. Since such people exist already, we know they are possible.

Men will marry women if that's what it takes to get sex. That's how things worked for centuries until recently.

Now a lot of women will give men sex without demanding marriage first. And men say, "Cool."

Even women who go to Bible-thumping churches will put out! It's incredible. Not even the threat of hellfire is enough to inhibit them.

It's fun for adults to have their freedom, but very hard on children who result.

If you live in a neighborhood where every adult holds an advanced degree and has a net worth of $1,000,000 or more, you will probably feel much safer than if you live in a public housing project where every adult is unemployed, on welfare, and failed to finish high school.

Granted, there could be some bad apples in the "nice" neighborhood, and some true saints in the public housing project, but not enough to affect the property values.

Why do you suppose the same type of house costs more in the "nice" neighborhood than in the slum? Because in the "nice" neighborhood, you are paying a premium to buy better neighbors.

In the slums, every night there are muggings, shootings, burglaries, rapes, beatings, etc. In the nice neighborhood, the crime rate is drastically lower. They probably go years without a murder. In the slum, you might have drug dealers on every corner, a crack house next door, your neighbor has five kids by four different fathers and she's on welfare and pimping herself out to pay for drugs.

Now, you can pretend that all people are sinners and therefore somehow equal, but you don't really believe that unless you are insane.

The housing market sure doesn't believe it. That's why property values are higher where you don't have shitbags for neighbors.

It's easy for God to forgive, since he makes up all the rules to begin with and cannot be harmed by the mere humans he created. To God, people are like ants that a child keeps in an ant farm for amusement. For the ants who are stuck in the ant farm, what goes on inside is important, but to the child, it is just a game.

God doesn't have to be afraid when he walks through a slum late at night. But you do.

People are animals, but fancy animals, who can do some things no other animal does, or at least we do them to an elaborate degree that no other animal does. Nonetheless, our emotional brains are still very animal. Skills like speech and abstract thought and logical thinking came later and were layered onto the ancient emotional brain, which still holds primary sway. I'm sure you are driven about by your feelings much more than by your logic. Your belief in God is evidence of this.

Fathers will be present if that's what it takes to get sex from women. That's how it worked for centuries. 100 years ago there were not millions of men fathering children and then abandoning them. That's because 100 years ago it was not easy to pick up women for quick sex. Men today are pretty much the same as men back then. Men have not changed; instead the rules have changed.

Actually, if we are talking about naked obese people, the issue is not merely one of size, but also of shape and texture. "Size" itself sounds like a fairly neutral trait (if people differed only in terms of size, they would all have basically similar body types), so your rhetorical ploy is pretty transparent. Fat people look much different than lean people, even if you scale their photos to make them appear similar in size.

In any case, not wanting to view naked fat people is not the same as "denigrating" them.

I don't particularly care to view naked men either, nor elderly people, and that is not "denigrating" them.

Do you feel as if everyone who does not wish to see you naked is "denigrating" you? If so, you strike me as hypersensitive.

I imagine there are quite a lot of people who have no wish to see me naked, and I do not feel "denigrated" by them, at least on that basis alone.

On a closely related subject, there are lots of character strings you could type on Usenet that would get you fired from your job---or worse. I don't care where in the world you live, there are some things you could write that would deeply offend influential persons in your culture and cause them to react against you.

As far as I am aware, every human culture prohibits or sanctions some sort(s) of displays or behaviors based on little or nothing more than that some influential faction in that culture finds the display deeply offensive, or considers the display an affront to its values. For example, the French who are so casual about public nudity aren't so casual about Muslim headscarves on schoolgirls. Muslims themselves did not protest when the Taliban blew up ancient priceless statues of the Buddha (at Bamiyan, Afghanistan), but when someone mocked the Prophet in a cartoon, a Muslim mob responded by burning a Danish embassy. Desecrate the Buddha: silence; desecrate the Prophet: death to the infidel!

Often, the behaviors or displays that one culture finds deeply offensive are innocuous or even encouraged in another culture, and vice versa, as the above examples illustrate.

Humans are irrational and logically inconsistent; therefore human laws are too.

If you can find one example of a human culture which consistently refrains from banning any sort of expression based on nothing more than protecting some of its members from feeling offended, please present it.

It's interesting that people who lived for thousands of years without stigmatizing nudity should make such easy prey for recreational drugs introduced by outsiders. Perhaps Yanomami culture wasn't all that emotionally satisfying after all.

The Noble Savage theory takes a beating when the supposedly happy and emotionally fulfilled savages themselves willingly commit cultural suicide by turning themselves into a bunch of drunks as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Perhaps their idyllic existence wasn't all the paradise it's cracked up to be. Since casual acceptance of nudity was part of the deal they had, and they are rapidly choosing to abandon it, evidently the people who are in best position to judge nudity on its merits aren't too impressed by it.

In case you're new to Usenet grandstanding, a typical strategy is for the grandstander to re-cast his personal gripe as part of something much larger and far more important.

For example, I think automobiles suck, and people should drive less. A lot less than is typical in the United States just now. But not many people care about my personal preference. Therefore, I try to argue not in terms of what I personally prefer, but in terms of things other people might care about: the fact that pumping billions of dollars into countries like Saudi Arabia finances a lot of Islamic terrorism which then sucks the U.S. into the Endless Petroleum War; the fact that automobiles produce another 9/11 worth of violent killings in the U.S. every month; the fact that urban sprawl and traffic congestion are ruining just about everything; the fact that with all the violent traffic terrorizing pedestrians and cyclists off the roads is making people fatter and fatter (helped of course by the explosion in fast-food drive-throughs doling out tasty packets of concentrated calories); etc.

Intolerance for sexual minorities would be a majority behavior (if only a minority we so intolerant, the majority would define their behavior as a crime, and punish it), whereas rape, incest, pedophilia and other forms of sexual abuse are (probably) minority behaviors, at least in peacetime societies. (I'm not sure what to make of the mass rapes conquering armies have commonly perpetrated during wartime---I don't think that is the result of sexual repression and the stigmatization of nudity. I think it's more the result of horny young men concentrating in large numbers and having all the guns, and therefore all the freedom to do as they please.)

Now, forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical up front that the minority of people prone to become rapists during peacetime would be influenced to rape more frequently by the same sexual repression that influences the majority to persecute sexual minorities. It seems a bit of a reach to believe the same sexual repression would produce such different results in different people. I allow for the possibility, but as this is such a politically convenient result for you to postulate, I would like to see something at least remotely approximating proof.

In any case, aren't rapists themselves a sexual minority? You don't sound very tolerant of them. You also don't sound very tolerant of people whose taste in porn differs from your own. It's ironic that someone who demands respect for his own odd sexual proclivities would look down his nose at someone else's.

In any case, if you're one of those neo-prudes who loftily prefers "erotica" while disdaining the rabble who prefer their "porn," let us bear in mind that "the difference between erotica and porn is lighting."

Since obese people tend to under-report their actual eating, in proportion to how obese they are, i.e. in proportion to how much they overeat, I'm open to the possibility that some of the excess eating occurs at some level below what we could consider fully conscious intention. Maybe even below the level of fully conscious awareness. That is, perhaps some of the time the glutton reaches for the snack food without consciously planning to do so or even really thinking about it.

Lots of compulsive behaviors are like this.

For example, why are you just now reading this Usenet article? Did you plan your day to allocate a definite time for reading Usenet, or did you just sort of absently click on your browser when you meant to be doing other things and now you kind of find yourself in here?

Almost any woman who is young and not excessively deformed can easily sleep with hundreds of men if she wants to. The challenge for women is not getting men to have sex with them, but getting men to commit to them and provide resources.

In contrast, the challenge for men is to get lots of young women to provide easy sex, without demanding commitment and resources.

If pictures of ugly women moved more product, that's what advertisers would show.

This reviewer sounds like a lawyer, trying to raise some reasonable doubt, or perhaps any doubt that might sound reasonable to a jury of people who weren't smart enough to avoid jury duty.

As misogyny varies widely between cultures, it is not a good candidate for a predominantly genetic behavior. If all men in every culture were misogynists, then we could expect genes had much to do with it.

It's possible to train men to be nicer to women. Many cultures have done this. In contrast, it doesn't seem possible to train men to find 90-year-old women more attractive than they find women in the 16-25 range, because there is no culture in which elderly women are considered the most attractive.

In general, "hatred" is a label ascribed to others. Not many cultures actually say "We hate women." Thus it is a form of cultural imperialism to label a culture with hate if the culture itself does not label itself so. This is no different than calling people some racial slur instead of the name they use for themselves.

A married woman is likely to have more opportunities to cheat, because if she looks good, men will hit on her as she goes about her ordinary business; whereas for a man to get laid, he has to put a lot of effort and time into pursuing women, because women don't hit on him.

Thus there is a certain unfairness---a married woman can claim she is not to blame when men hit on her, whereas for a married man to obtain a similar number of opportunities, he would have to be actively hitting on other women, which in itself could look like a mild form of "cheating."

I don't know who cheats more, but clearly married women will usually have more opportunities to cheat than their husbands do.

If women generally hit on men the way men hit on women, I think married men would be cheating way more. That is, given equal opportunities to cheat, married men would be more likely to perceive "conditions" as being "right" than their wives would---I bet.

In a short-term relationship, you experience your partner at only one age.

In a long-term relationship, the problem of youth is self-correcting. For example, in a relationship that lasts ten years, you can expect the 22-year-old to become a 32-year-old.

In contrast, a partner who is already old enough to begin losing her looks will only look worse in another ten years. But since her personality and habits were already "mature" to begin with, her increase in age is unlikely to make her more desirable on that basis.

Most Hollywood actress types report that their careers largely dry up somewhere around or before they hit 40. A few manage to keep going, but not many; not when there are so many fresh-faced 20-somethings with equal talent constantly trying to break in (or sleep in) to the industry.

The same thing goes for pop starlets. And supermodels. Etc. A small percentage can keep going after 40, but only a very small percentage.

It's almost exactly the same as male athletes in most of the major pro sports. A few football and baseball players can keep going into their 40's, but they don't have much in the way of future upside. In the NFL, the average career is less than 4 years. The average team keeps drafting 7-10 new young players every year, so the veterans have to keep outperforming progressively younger players, who are in endless supply.

That's about how Hollywood works. The average actress is a pretty young woman. She gets a few roles, perhaps playing the girlfriend of some older male stars, and then she fades from view, even before she loses her looks in many cases.

Compare a list of the top 100 Hollywood actresses from 1986, 1996, and 2006. There is a very high turnover per decade. Even for male actors it is similar. Guys like Clint Eastwood, who can keep starring in successful films for decades, are the exception. To keep working, he had to change the way he acts, to account for the drastic change in how he looks. He cannot get away with acting the way he did when he was younger. He can't go swaggering into saloons waving his sixguns and getting all the girls.

Most men are superficial, but so are most women. For example, it seems the vast majority of women have some sort of minimum height requirement for a sex partner. If a man is shorter than a woman's minimum height requirement, she rules him out on that basis alone, before knowing anything else about him.

There's nothing superficial about getting one's ass kicked by a rival male.

Men can be ruthless competitors. Surrendering to a potent rival is not necessarily a "superficial" decision---it may be prudent.

For example, I would probably not date a woman if I discovered she had a stalker ex-boyfriend with a long rap sheet featuring weapons violations and assault charges, even aside from what it would say about her to have gotten involved with such a man.

It might be like trying to stop a suicide bomber. The suicide bomber is ready to sacrifice his own life to harm others, and isn't deterred by a threat of punishment. It's difficult to deal with desperate people like that without getting yourself hurt in the process.

For example, if a happily married man happens to "run into" Heidi Klum every day under "innocent" circumstances, and she takes an interest in him, the odds are very high that he finds Heidi Klum to be much more attractive than his wife, and he's probably a goner if Heidi is determined to do him.

The reason this isn't generally understood by women is that there are very few women as attractive as Heidi Klum, and they don't go around trying to wreck average homes. So it's easy for the average woman to imagine her average man isn't sleeping with Heidi Klum because he doesn't want to and wouldn't want to.

That's sort of like concluding the illegal immigrant doing your dirty work for low pay is there because he likes it. If he won the lottery, he'd be gone as soon as he could cash the ticket.

The world remains somewhat stable and functional, however, because most of the power relationships are relatively fixed. In other words, everyone has his or her place in the hierarchy, and most people accept their place. The man who has no shot at a Heidi Klum pretty much comes to terms with it, and forgets about doing better. Similarly, most people are not billionaires, but we don't lose much sleep over it.

The phrase "socially acceptable to you" doesn't even parse. If someone is "socially acceptable," that means society accepts that person, and that is independent of my acceptance of that person.

If you are asking whether I evaluate women in terms of how I suspect others might react to her, I imagine I do this to some degree subconsciously. Since I have to interact with other people who matter, people who might treat me differently based on the women I associate with, I suppose it makes sense to take this into account along with everything else.

Most of the women I have been involved with seemed to fit into society well enough. In most cases, better than I do. In general I feel more socially accepted when I am half of a couple than when I am alone, but that's not my primary motive for seeking the company of women.

The most attractive women are so difficult to attract, thanks to the intense competition for them, that only the truly motivated men do what it takes. That would pretty much rule out guys who only want to impress their friends.

But hey, don't knock impressing your friends. On those rare occasions when I've manage to enjoy an exceptionally attractive woman, even if only briefly, the result was that I heard my friends commenting about her for years afterward. You won't hear me knocking that. Hot chicks would be great even if you had to keep them secret, though. Impressing people is just a little icing on an already nice cake.

It's kind of like the way earning a billion dollars impresses people, but the motivation cannot solely be to impress people. People who make a billion dollars have to like what they do in a way that goes far beyond merely impressing others, because it usually requires so much effort and focus.

It's like the Gil Grissom character said on the CSI TV show: people who are really good at something don't do it for the praise.

If I had a nickel for every woman who scoffs, "I would never put up with [affront X]!", I could build shelters for the same women after they hook up with men who beat them.

Actually, freaks have no purpose. They just happen. Occasionally a random mutation makes a freak slightly better at surviving and reproducing, giving it a chance to pass on its mutation. But most of the time, selection (i.e., reality) wipes out most of the freaks.

Do you agree that "black children in white homes are cut off from the healthy development of themselves as black people"? Or would you regard that to be equally as offensive as a claim that "white children in black homes are cut off from the healthy development of themselves as white people"?

A very small minority of men are highly attractive to many women, and can choose almost any sort of women they want. (Examples of such men: rock stars, sports stars, entertainment stars, especially the ones who are relatively young, very handsome, and highly paid.)

These men who can have almost any sort of women, what women do they choose?

Typically, the more choices a man has in women, the more he chooses women who are highly attractive in the conventional sense: women who are exceptionally attractive, and often work as photographic models and so on. That is, men with a choice choose the same women almost all other men would choose if they had a choice.

This empirical observation does not support your theory that unattainability is itself a component of a woman's attractiveness to men. If it were, men for whom most women are pretty much attainable should show no preference for women who are unattainable to most other men.

In any case, what makes an unattainable woman unattainable in the first place? The fact that most men already found her attractive, before they knew anything about her attainability.

Studies have shown that women indeed revise their perceptions of a man's attractiveness, after the fact, if they learn that large numbers of other women are competing for him. That's because a woman's attraction to a man depends strongly on his social status, which is not a property intrinsic to the man, but depends on how large numbers of other people happen to view him at the moment.

For example, a boy who is shorter, weaker, and nerdier than the other boys will tend to be less attractive to girls as the age cohort passes through adolescence---but that could change drastically if the effete boy becomes a popular musician.

There is no doubt that people tend to show less appreciation for things they have a steady, secure supply of, but that doesn't mean they necessarily prefer something else. For example, if you had a lifetime supply of the world's finest gourmet foods at no cost, would that make you any more likely to eat from a dumpster? No, in practice it works the opposite way: the more choices people have, the more they demand quality.

It's true that for almost any woman you can name, there is some man who is tired of having sex with her, but that doesn't mean those guys are chasing women who are drastically less conventionally attractive than the women they are tired of. Most often, when a man gets tired of one woman, the next woman he gets is probably similar in physical attractiveness.

Also, when a man gets "tired" of a woman, what he's "tired" of are her traits which are not the traits that initially attracted him to her.

There is a large industry to help married people cope with the stresses, conflicts, breakdowns, and special needs peculiar to marriage (marriage counselors, divorce lawyers, police and courts to mediate domestic disputes, etc.).

There is no corresponding industry to help single people cope with the stresses, breakdowns, and special needs peculiar to being single. Single people have needs, of course, but their needs are generally not peculiar to being single, so there is not much of an industry specifically targeting singles only.

For example, there is a clearly recognized need for "marriage counselors," but no correspondingly recognized need for "singles counselors." There are jobs for marriage counselors, but few people could make a living exclusively as singles counselors.

That's because while being alone tends to get boring, even somewhat depressing, nobody has much trouble getting along with himself (without any need for professional advice), in contrast to the daunting challenge of getting along with a member of the opposite sex for any serious length of time. You might have to pay someone to tell you how to stay married to a woman, and persuade you to try, but you don't have to pay anyone to tell you how to stay single.

Since you are a human, you have lots of needs. If you partner with another human, she will have lots of needs too, and many of her needs will differ from yours. It would take a miracle for two people, who each have their own different sets of needs, to meet all the needs of the other.

A better option would be to partner with someone who has no needs, and who only wants to meet your needs. No human is like that, so that sort of partnership won't be possible until humans invent artificial companions designed specifically for that purpose.

There are already weak steps in that direction. Every machine humans build has no needs of its own; it only exists to meet some human needs. A machine might need some things to operate so it can meet human needs (such as fuel, electricity, maintenance, etc.), but the machine has no needs that are independent of meeting the needs of the people it serves. That is, if the machine is well-designed.

It's sad that most people are so illogical and hypersensitive that they can only have pleasant conversations (a) about nothing, or (b) with yes-men.

The problem you are overlooking is the equal protection thing which is the basis for a democratic society. The law isn't comfortable with definitions of crime that apply only to some people and not to others. If it's illegal for, say, an adult man to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, then to keep things fair it pretty much also has to be illegal for an adult woman to have sex with a 14-year-old boy. If you start trying to work in exceptions for gender, or for physically attractive people, that creates a slippery slope problem. Plus the definition of "gender" itself is not always clear. What if a pedophile gets gender reassignment surgery to turn himself into a "woman," and s/he continues to prey on children?

The problem with that approach is that other people are just as emotional as you, but in the case of women, with very different emotions. A billion years of evolution has yielded women who are very well designed for obtaining resources from men (by any means necessary) to feed their expensive offspring. A woman is not emotionally equipped by evolution to feel anything is wrong with expecting you to pay for your moment of pleasure for the next 18 years. If a woman does let you off the hook, she will feel she is doing you a huge favor. That is how evolution has constructed her emotional brain.

Whenever person X does something that bothers person Y, there are two solutions:

1. Person X can stop doing it.
2. Person Y can tolerate it.

Which solution is "better" depends on who you ask. In general, everybody wants to place the burden on the other guy.

I'm trying to think what could be objectively bad with a sexual encounter between a 14-year-old boy and a 25-year-old woman, assuming both are willing. There are, of course, all the usual risks of sex, but it seems a 25-year-old woman would be more likely to approach sex responsibly than, say, a 14-year-old girl. That is, if a 14-year-old boy is going to have sex with someone, an older woman seems likely to be a safer partner. An adult woman can easily obtain contraceptives, whereas a 14-year-old girl might be less well prepared, both pharmaceutically as well as emotionally.

When men look at naked women, they typically want to have sex with the women they are viewing. That is relevant to men wanting to have sex with the naked women they are looking at.

In most cases, a man cannot have sex with the woman who posed for photos. But this is an example of recently introduced technology changing the reproductive game rules. In the ancestral environment, before there were any photographs, when a man saw an attractive young woman looking at him and posing seductively, there was a pretty good chance he was actually in scoring position. So it's hardly a wonder men should enjoy seeing that.

It's like the way touching a hot stove instantly unleashes pain, long before you have time to analyze the harm that will result if you continue to touch the hot stove and destroy your flesh. Children (and animals) quickly learn to avoid touching hot objects that can burn them even though they lack correct knowledge about the damage and its consequences. All they have to know is that it hurts.

When a woman is fashionable, she feels good. When she looks a mess, she feels bad. When a man is successful, he feels good. When a man fails repeatedly, he feels bad. In each case, what makes a person feel good is what made their ancestors more likely to produce viable offspring.

Conscious minds work on a "need to know basis." If the emotional brain can direct its survival machine to behave in the "right" way, by orchestrating the proper urges and feelings, the conscious mind does not need to know what is going on. The conscious mind often serves as more of a spectator, thinking up explanations for what the rest of the brain is doing, and then believing its explanations. The conscious mind constructs a kind of running narrative to make sense of what it observes, and to sustain its sense of "self."

Sex itself is fun, but the process of getting to the sex may not be. For example, a man may have to approach many women before he finds one who shows him a hint of interest. Then he must do and say a whole bunch of specific things in the correct sequence, or she will lose interest.

If you are a woman who looks at least reasonably good, the process may be more enjoyable for you, since the men who approach you already find you attractive, so you don't have to waste time with men who aren't even attracted to you.

Getting a paycheck is also fun, but what you must do to get the paycheck may not be. How many people feel overjoyed at getting their paycheck? Often by then they associate the unpleasantry of work with the paycheck, and are less able to enjoy the final reward. Or they look at all the deductions for taxes and health insurance, etc., and feel stressed.

In contrast, see how contestants get excited on a game show when they win amounts of money similar to what they earn on their jobs. It's more fun to win the money on a game show because it's faster, easier, unexpected, and less vexing than earning money on most jobs.

Would you enjoy vacationing in Hawaii if you had to undergo six months of torture at a CIA detention center in an undisclosed location to get there? No matter how good the final outcome, the effect can be spoiled if the price you pay for it is too high.

This is why sex robots have the potential to be more enjoyable than most human partners: aside from the monetary cost, sex robots won't present any hassles to spoil the fun.

If it is true that everyone is born with a completely blank mind, and all our emotions are purely the result of our conditioning, then people could, in principle, be conditioned to like or dislike anything.

For example, that would mean all the trauma and damage most people associate with children being raped is purely a cultural construct. That is, you are claiming rape is only bad because people have been taught to consider it to be bad; and with some different sort of conditioning, children could be taught to enjoy being raped and not to experience troubling emotions about it.

Can you describe the sort of social conditioning that would do the trick?

I don't think any sort of social conditioning would do the trick. There are solid sociobiological reasons why humans should have evolved an instinctive negative emotional reaction to being raped, which cannot be conditioned away.

hat does looking at caveman art tell us about anything? It only tells us that some guy who has been dead for 30,000 years drew something one day. We don't know why he drew it, what he meant by it (if anything), or how his peers reacted to it. Maybe he wasn't drawing porn. Maybe he was depicting his mother. Maybe he was drawing a political cartoon and making fun of someone else's preferences. People who look at the drawing 30,000 years later can only guess as to what it meant at the time. If Martians picked up some TV shows from Earth, would they guess correctly what the shows mean? The Martians would lack the cultural context to make sense of the shows.

There is lots of Native American rock art which depicts humans, animals, etc., as idealized geometric forms. Does that mean Native American men lusted after circles, triangles, squares, etc.? The odd thing is that these geometric forms are rarely observable in nature. Somehow the human brain is able to think of these things while hardly ever seeing them. Or maybe it's just easier to draw them than to draw photographically realistic scenes.

For all we know, maybe ancient artists were being censored by their tribal councils, and they purposely had to make sure they did not depict women too sexily.

Look at all the art today. How much of it is intended, or ends up being, for sexual titillation? Often artists look down their noses at art which actually gives men boners. That's not "art," it's "porn."

With a young woman, what you see is closer to what you actually get.

I'm guessing a fair chunk of the Madonna you like now could be washed off.

If fundamentalists and evangelicals are dominating American politics, why is there more porn on the Internet than ever? Speaking of which, I read a funny quote: "If they took all the porn off the Internet, there would only be one site left, and it would say: Bring back the Internet porn."

Today the Internet channels a flood of smut into every home that would have been unimaginable even in the decadent 1960's, the decade we are supposedly backlashing against right now.