All right, so
let's talk about Random Pregnancy Opportunities....They do pop up
from time to time. There you are, and all of a sudden, for no apparent
reason, it looks as though you might have a pretty decent chance of
being able to have sex with someone you've never had sex with before!
Alcohol sometimes facilitates Random Pregnancy Opportunities and sometimes
it's nowhere in evidence. You might be at a party and all of a sudden
someone you are attracted to, or someone you are not attracted to,
says boldly 'I could really go for you' in a manner that suggests
that the two of you could be going at pregnancy-causing activities
together in relatively short order if you will only cooperate. This
kind of shit happens all the time - sometimes to me, sometimes to
you, sometimes to other people right before our disbelieving eyes!
Sometimes men
initiate these encounters, sometimes women do. If a man is initiating
one with a woman, then it is technically a Random Pregnancy Opportunity
for the woman. For the man, it is a Desperate Attempt to Get Lucky.
If a women initiates such an encounter, it is a Random Pregnancy Opportunity
for the man. For the woman it is A Desperate Attempt to Get Laid.
All right, so that's nice and logical and easy to follow.
Let's look at
this phenomenon from the viewpoint of the decently functioning Male
Evolutionary Sex Brain (often referred to here affectionately as Your
Sex Brain). Your Sex Brain will not want to pass up most Random
Pregnancy Opportunities - that would be just foolish. And of course,
while evaluating the Opportunity, Your Sex Brain should remain spryly
alert to visual cues (such as boob to waist size ratio and harmonious
facial proportions) that indicate whether the chance of healthy offspring
makes it worthwhile to seize the Pregnancy Opportunity.
If you listen
to your Sex Brain very very closely when presented with a Random Pregnancy
Opportunity, you can hear a few moments (milliseconds sometimes) of
silence while it furiously whips out its calculator to calculate the
potential health and desirability of offspring from this unexpected
pairing. Once it does this, it will give you its suggested response
to the situation. Often the response is -what the hell, why
not? You can actually hear it say this sometimes as a voice in your
head - what the hell, why not? This is specifically your Sex Brain
speaking quite clearly. Sometimes it will simply say 'uh, yeah, sure'
or make other noises to indicate speedy cooperation with the suggestion
to engage in Pregnancy Causing Activities. Sometimes it will say 'my
my this is a shockingly pleasant surprise' and then inaugurate signals
to indicate speedy cooperation.
Sometimes it will
say - 'uh, better back off on this one buddy. Ugly kids, not good.'
Sometimes it will think - 'hmmm, I think is actually an opportunity
to get roped into something more strenuous than pregnancy-causing
activities, such as long-term mating and actual parenthood. I'll think
I'll pass on that because We Are Not Ready.' Sometimes it will think
- 'oooh, I don't want you to be the mother of my children -
under any circumstances.' And many times it will think - 'hmmm...well
it looks a bit dicey I'll admit, but I'll lay the odds somewhere around
50-50 that the offspring from this Random Pregnancy Opportunity could
be healthy enough to survive and that's plenty good enough for me.
Let's do it!'
In these Random
Pregnancy Opportunities, your Sex Brain will calculate the odds as
if you were Not Going to Be a Parent to These Random Potential Offspring
and it will guide your choices accordingly. Someone else, such as
the woman who initiated the Random Pregnancy Opportunity may be the
parent of these critters, but nobody could seriously expect YOU
to be a parent to something produced via a Random Pregnancy Opportunity.
Society doesn't always agree with this reasoning of course, but it
is standard issue Sex Brain reasoning and wealthy celebrities such
as Bill Cosby are often shocked (shocked!) to discover that courts
will enforce nominal parent-like activities such as dishing out money
to the female Random Pregnancy Opportunity Initiator and those critters
you and she spawned.
Your Sex Brain
views a Random Pregnancy Opportunity as a free spin on the Lotto Wheel
of Reproduction. Acting under the premise that this shot at genetic
immortality is free, it will encourage you to have sex with women
you don't like, in inconvenient places and times, with inappropriate
people, while drunk, and with little feeling of anything except oh
yeah, this is an Opportunity, Let's Hurry. Because, after all, it's
freeeeeee!
Now, fairly
obviously, the math for women on Random Opportunities is somewhat
different. When a man approaches a woman in hopes of initiating
a Random Pregnancy Opportunity, the woman's Sex Brain must factor
in the potential for carting around another entity for nine months
while it grows. This fairly obviously means that the Random Opportunity
scenario carries far graver consequences for an individual woman than
it does an individual man. So it takes a higher threshold of Luscious
Opportunity for a woman's Sex Brain to give the green-light. Now if
it was a Random Opportunity to get pregnant with Brad Pitt - it would
be worth it. Really. Consequences be damned! It is simply worth it
to make an attempt to have Brad Pitt's baby if the opportunity presents
itself, more often than not.
It is worth
it partly because Brad Pitt is damn good-looking. He has the right
facial proportions, good eyes, a decent body, and widespread appeal.
Some theorists call this the Handsome Son Effect. Basically, the reasoning
goes, if you have a child with an incredibly handsome man you will
more than likely produce a Goddamn Good-Looking Son and evolution
is in favor of this, presumably because it will help him get laid
and therefore give you a leg up in the race to have granchildren.
So...not only
do good-looking men consistently have access to more resources throughout
their lives (owing as noted earlier to the I Am Not A Neanderthal
Effect which allows the good-looking man in question to charm
you out of all your money instead of beat you up for it - a decidedly
more pleasant way to go), but they are also more pleasant to be around
as a potential mate (because they don't look scary and because it
is very soothing to the human brain to look at gorgeous things), and
they produce better-looking kids, and these better-looking
kids (both male and female you sexist pigs researchers who don't take
into account good-looking daughters!) have access to more resources
throughout their lives, which allows them to not only survive but
pop out even more good-looking grandchildren. There's a whole heap
of unfair advantages accruing to good-looking men (all 12 of them)
and the only comfort is that in spite of all their advantages, good-looking
people routinely manage to fuck up their lives like everyone else.
So now Jennifer
Anniston apparently doesn't agree that it is worthwhile to get pregnant
with Brad Pitt but there's a reason for that. The reason is that
she married him, which makes him something other than a Random Pregnancy
Opportunity as far as her Sex Brain goes. Other criteria are squriming
their way onto the chalkboard, including, of all things, a perceived
lack of resources. This reasoning is patently absurd on the face of
it, but her Sex Brain is like everyone else's and evolution isn't
aware that it is encouraging Jennifer Anniston to make decisions based
on an apparently idiotic assessment of reality.
Your personal
Sex Brain routinely encourages you to make decisions based
on an apparently idiotic assessment of reality and it does this because
it is buried way down deep in your brain stem where it has a hard
time hearing you. It has to figure out what's going on in your life
after stuff has filtered down through god knows how many layers during
which the messages become garbled. So it relies on good old-fashioned
chemistry and deductive reasoning. If your amygdala lights up with
delight on seeing a particular woman's face, it says to itself, okay,
good show, let's go. If your cortisol shoots through the roof, it
figures, whoah, bad stress, let's step back a moment here and check
resources. Ms. Anniston's cortisol happened to be shooting through
the roof even before she laid eyes on Angelina Jolie's gigantic lips
and it probably still hasn't come down.
Regardless of
the sex lives of mega-celebrities, there are some cases, or some men,
wherein it is absolutely worth it for a woman to seize a Random Pregnancy
Opportunity and many instances where it is not. The female Sex
Brain pulls out its calculator too and sometimes it thinks to itself,
well, what's the worst that could happen - I'd accidentally end up
with an incredibly good-looking child. There are worse things
than that! Unfortunately, as we saw, there are relatively few instances
where this is the case and therefore the female Sex Brain is generally
not interested in Random Pregnancy Opportunities.
The disparity
in reaction to Random Pregnancy Opportunities underlies a lot of the
myths (and realities) about the male and female sexuality. This
is one area where things are just different for the 2 sexes. If it's
worth for it a woman to seize a particular Random Pregnancy Opportunity,
the man in question very often has enough advantages that it is worth
it to hope you could hook up with him on the kind of long-term basis
that would allow his multifarious advantages to accrue to you over
time in a pleasant and life-enhancing way.
Which means that
if you happen to be male and you unexpectedly meet with success
after initiating a Desperate Attempt to Get Lucky, you may very well
find yourself with having had sex with someone who is now fantasizing
about snagging you as a long-tem mate. This doesn't always happen
because, as we'll explain later, many instances of getting lucky are
not random at all, but it can happen. This is tremendously flattering
and a bit confusing since that's not what your Sex Brain was fantasizing
about.
If you spend
the majority of your sex life in the Random Opportunities mode, you
could very well come to the conclusion that women are only interested
in long term mates and men are mainly interested in good boobs.
But if things
go even modestly well for you, you will not spend the majority of
your life in Random Opportunities Mode, and entirely different rules
will apply, some of them downright salacious and shocking!
In fact, some
of those women initiating Random Pregnancy Opportunities may not be
looking for a good mate at all! They may instead be looking for
Hot Hot Sex NOW! How dare they? How could evolution allow them
to get away with having sex with you when you are in no way, shape,
or form anything even vaguely resembling a Good Mate?! It's mysterious,
isn't it?
And yet obviously
it happens - after all there are a heck of a lot of unwed teenage
mothers - and most of them apparently weren't following anything even
resembling an attempt to Find a Good Mate. Hmmm....
Maybe we need
to think about what a workable reproductive strategy actually is.
Or maybe we just need to think a lot more about women and sex.
Oh all right,
you convinced me! We'll think about both!
In
which we are lucky enough to think deeply about reproductive strategies
and randomly about women and sex....
prettyfedup.com
