random thoughts of the reproductive strategies of women and men

So the first thing we have to do when exploring the fascinating topics of reproductive strategies and women and sex is take a look at the Sex Brain itself and dispel a few ugly tabloid rumors that have sprung up about this organ that its publicist adamantly denies.

The first is that the Sex Brain is primarily interested in sex. It's not. The Sex Brain is primarily interested in grandchildren. What the Sex Brain wants is not only for you to produce little critter-like replicas of yourself that have the advantage of having someone else's DNA as well as yours so that your flaws and disadvantages will be minimized - no, that's not enough for the greedy Sex Brain, it wants those critters to grow up and produce critters of their own. That's when the Sex Brain relaxes - and it celebrates by going out and getting itself a bumper sticker that says 'Happiness is Being a Grandparent.' The Sex Brain loves that bumper sticker.

In the pursuit of grandchildren, sometimes the Sex Brain is actually adamantly opposed to sex and will voice its opinion vigorously by refusing to let you have any, if at all possible. On the other hand, the Sex Brain will in many instances advocate furiously for sexual activities the Pope firmly believes are morally wrong and in some cases has never even heard of. The Sex Brain firmly believes it is smarter and more beneficial to humanity than the Pope and perhaps it is.

For the Sex Brain's ally in the lifelong quest for grandchildren is complicated math. Complicated math like calculus and solving equations with an insane number of variables in an environment of uncertainty. Your Sex Brain is one math genius! You personally may have found yourself stumped somewhere in the realm of elementary school arithmetic but your Sex Brain is more than capable of going mano a mano with __________ (insert name of some math genius here) and beating the pants off him or her.

Your Sex Brain is not always correct in how it solves the completely mystifying equation of your life - after all it is dealing with parameters that involve uncertainty and unpredictability but that doesn't mean it doesn't give its all trying - and by and large, the Sex Brains of humanity have done all right for themselves. Sex Brains are much much smarter than human beings. Why not take yours to a baseball game and treat it to a cold beer today?

All righty, then. Now that we have established that your Sex Brain is better at math than you are, let's demonstrate how by examining the thesis of our coherent ranting friend's argument. Which was:Women only have one workable reproductive strategy, which is Find a Good Mate. Men have two: Find a Good Mate, and Have Sex with Any Fertile Woman You Can.

So...is this really true in real lfe? And if it is, does it constitute a Good Excuse? Let's look at it from your Sex Brain's POV.

The Evolutionary Sex Brain has three basic options for securing grandchildren in most cases. They are:

Option #1: Have kids. Raise them. Guard their survival until they have reproduced themselves. Relax. Brag to friends and neighbors about grandchildren. This is a univerally popular option and my goodness doesn't it sound just all socially appropriate and everything?

Option #2: Have kids. Do not raise them. Hope someone else does. Hope that some survive and produce kids of their own. This is the "I'm Looking to Get Lucky" option. Also popular worldwide. In every time, place, and culture Not Doing Any Actual Parenting has been pursued by a certain percentage of people of both sexes who accidentally, or not so accidentally, conceive.

Option #3: Have kids. Attempt to raise them. Run into obstacles, such as death, hatred of their other parent, serious resource reversals, or whatever the hell. Come to the conclusion that said kids may be better off without you or that your reproductive future may be better off without them. Say Hmmmm... and then abandon attempts to raise the kids you already had. Hope they raise themselves or someone else does it for you. Also a popular option.

Close your eyes and think real hard. Can you think of an example in real life for each of the three situations? Of course you can. Very good.

People, including some in your very own country, have kids and then give them up for adoption, or sometimes leave them on police station doorsteps, in the dumpster, with their grandparents, or where the hell ever.

Some people start out raising their kids and then bail. Sometimes they bail when the little critter in question is with the other parent - and sometimes they don't. Men do this much, much more frequently than women but both sexes will do it in a pinch.

And of course lots of people just buckle down and raise their young'uns, like it or not, good or bad, worried or pleased, through thick and thin and all that kind of stuff.

Bottom line - you can conceive children and be a parent to them or you can conceive children and not be a parent to them. Sometimes the parenting way works and sometimes the not parenting way works.

From the calculus-loving Sex Brain's point of view, the advantage of being a parent is that, statistically, you have the best chance of not only ensuring that your very own offspring reproduce, you also frequently get to witness it, and even badger them into having grandchildren until they just give up and go ahead and do it. This is the percentage bet from the Sex Brain's POV.

The disadvantage is that it is time and resource-intensive and sometimes you can't always swing it. It doesn't always work. (Ofen this really hurts, by the way, when it doesn't work and the offspring you devoted so much to goes and dies on you or something really tragic like that. All parts of the human brain hate that shit - that my kid has died shit. They hate it.) Still, parenting is the preferred option if you can swing it.

But suppose you can't swing it. Suppose you don't have the resources to raise a kid. Hmmm....well, you could try Option #2, not being a parent. If you're going to try Option #2, percentage-wise, statistically, etc., you should go for quantity. Statistically, your non-parented offspring are probably going to die off without reproducing at a higher rate than the ones you parent. But if you can have enough, you could very well even out the odds and end up with say, maybe two that make it, which is about how many you probably could have had survive with Option #1, the parenting option.

These numbers aren't exact. Two that survive is not always the number your Sex Brain is shooting for. But the principle is fairly exact. Your Sex Brain makes an extremely complicated calculation on its mental chalkboard, stuffed with exotic variables, as to whether your personal percentage bet lies with Being a Parent or Not Being a Parent. It's not an absolute given that the equation will work out one way or the other.

If you start out being a parent and run into certain obstacles, your Sex Brain will make the exact same calculation. Which will more greatly enhance my personal potential for producing offspring that will survive to reproduce - Being a Parent to These Particular Rugrats or Not Being a Parent to These Particular Rugrats? Sometimes the Sex Brain will make the calculation a bit more altruistically - do my personal children have a better chance of surviving with me as a parent or with me getting the hell out of Dodge? Once again, it's not a given that the equation will work out a particular way.

Sometimes people are aware (even vaguely) that they are furiously making these calculations and lots of times they're not.

The basic structure of these equations is the same for both men and women. This seems absurd because there are very obvious anatomical differences between men and women. Men do not get pregnant, carry a fetus around, and then engage in strenuous childbirth. But the Sex Brain, pragmatic and decidedly unsympathetic character that it is, is not interested in hearing your gory difficult labor stories or in hearing you brag about how many women you can impregnate. It wants to know - are you going to produce more granchildren if you are a parent to your own kids or are you going to produce more grandchildren if you are not? It is absolutely maniacal on this question. And it spends a great deal of your youth glaring at you suspiciously, wondering if you are parent material. I'm talking about your personal Sex Brain here; it is probably staring at you right now, assessing you with either cynical contempt or happy glowy approval.

If your Sex Brain thinks you are Not a Potentially Good Parent, Hot Hot Sex NOW! becomes the preferred reproductive strategy. Male or female, doesn't make much of a difference - if you're not going to be a parent, you're not looking for a mate, you're looking for someone who can assist you in producing a non-disease-ridden bundle of joy that you can abandon. If you're not going to be a parent - you just need to get pregnant! Many other particulars become comparatively unimportant.

On the other hand, if you are a Potentially Good Parent, then you need a Mate. Male or female, your percentage bet goes up with a Mate. In fact, there is slightly more pressure on a male Sex Brain to secure a mate because women still have a lot of control over child care. Therefore, if you are going to jealously guard the safety and welfare of your soon to be grandchildren-producing darling little babies, you need to have access to their mother. And it would, in fact, be very helpful to be bonded to her and to have somehow convinced her to be bonded to you.

There's a bit less pressure on women because theoretically they are somewhat more likely to be able to guard the safety and welfare of their precious little ones even if Dad isn't around. Worldwide, in most times and places, the male preference for marriage is slightly stronger than the female preference. This preference often takes the form of social coercion that doesn't give women much of an option. This is partly accounted for by the fact that marriage is more beneficial for men from a number of viewpoints, particularly a physical standpoint since exposure to men and raising children takes a heavy toll on a woman's body over time. These sorts of things act to widen the disparity in preferences. On the other hand, this is partly offset by the reality that a child with a father has a better chance of survival and that being attached to a (nice) male can offer other significant survival advantages in many cases. So there's a trade off for both sexes.

What this means is that in reality women do not have just one workable reproductive strategy - they have at least two! Being a parent or not being a parent. It's the same for men.

Don't believe me? Let's take a whirlwind tour of some of sexual realities of women's lives.

If a certain percentage of men are following the Hot Hot Sex NOW! strategy of Not Even Trying to be a Parent at any given time, who exactly are they following it with? Who are they having Hot Hot Sex NOW! with. Well, sometimes their mates, and sometimes people they have forced into it - although that considerably reduces some of the Hot Hot elements of the Now! strategy.

The answer is that a fair number of them are having it with women who are following exactly the same strategy. The fact that women engage in the Hot Hot Sex NOW! strategy has not gone unnoticed by many a society. All over the globe at this very moment, thousands and thousands of women are engaging in vigorous reproductive activities with men who cannot reliably be considered a good mate in any fashion. Some societies are shocked, I tell you, shocked! to discover that women engage in reproductive activities in which all considerations of Good Mateness are apparently left in dust. Others are like, yeah, whatever.

Societies whose big logical (male) brains have become completely confused by the apparent fact that women are people too! sometimes refer to this phenomenon by considering it a psychological disorder - nymphomania. Or giving it relatively unkind descriptions such as tramps, sluts, whores, tarts, and...well, you can probably think of some others.

Some societies get their undies in a bunch over this phenomenon because of the dreadful social consequences of Children Born to People Who Are Not Good Mates. But it happens. All the goddamn time. Teenage girls get pregnant all over the world - even if large swaths of older people think it is a very bad idea. Women all over the world have kids and then abandon them. Or get pregnant and then abort. They always have. They probably always will even when it enrages people. The human female Sex Brain is absolutely not willing to go along with any ideas that being a parent or findng a good mate is its only reproductive strategy. In fact, sometimes it thinks it's a positively terrible strategy.

You know this. You absolutely know this. You know there are women (and/or teenagers) who will sleep with drug addicts or people who will give them AIDS. You know there are women who will have sex without birth control when there is no way in heaven or fucking hell they or the person they are sleeping with is in any shape to be a parent. You know there are women who will have sex with many different people within the course of a year and women who will voluntarily have sex with people they do not know. And even more than that, you know there are women who are obviously Desperate To Get Laid and who Are Obviously Trying to Signal Their Interest in a Random Pregnancy Opportunity.

There are groupies and nymphomaniacs and sluts and people who don't consider themselves any of these but who are not basing their willingness or lack of willingness to have sex with someone on their realistic chances of being a Good Mate.

Women who employ the Hot Hot Sex NOW! reproductive strategy have had songs written about them, bills passed to legislate them out of existence, sermons devoted to their supposedly evil ways, novels devoted to their description, wonky policy analyses devoted to ponderous concern with their existence, and endured various attempts to pretend that they they don't in fact exist. But they do. And frequently they are more than adequately successful at securing Hot Hot Sex NOW! and getting pregnant from it.

Everybody knows that some women get pregnant as teenagers, sometimes with several different people, have others raise their kids, get addicted, and have still more kids. People - women - do all kinds of fucking crap all the time, all over the world - and a fair amount of the time they do it because their Sex Brains urged them to - saying 'screw the whole Good Mate business - we don't have time for that - Hot Hot Sex NOW!'

In some societies, that's just considered par for the course. Some societies figure that both men and women will be what we consider promiscuous, having several partners, often at the same time, and that's the way it's going to be. Sometimes they even encourage it. Sometimes they encourage it specifically for the purpose of increasing reproduction. Sometimes they do it specifically to encourage the welfare of the children born to these very same promiscuous people.

Now you can think is terrible if you'd like. Sometimes it is. You get mad about it if you want to. You can swear on a stack of Bibles that both Jesus and evolution declare that women ought to prefer Good Mates to Hot Hot Sex NOW! and in some ways you'd be right. And in some ways you wouldn't.

Because, although women and men differ in the statistical distribution of various behavioral phenomena (and doesn't that just sound all romantic and cuddly), there are still some botton universals that everyone has to deal with whether they really like it or not - and usually they don't.

Let's explore the fascinating effect of one of these universals on women and sex, you and sex, other people and sex, and sex and sex. Can you guess what it is?

Of course you can. In fact, you already have. That's why you have to click the next link to prove how smart you are.

prettyfedup.com

the pretty fucked up website

The Not 100% Complete FAQs for the Pretty Fucked Up Person in a Pretty Fucked Up World

Women actually have more than one reproductive strategy - whoah hoh!