Restoring Pride by Richard Taylor

Stardusk posted a video on YouTube a few years ago called The Rabbit Hole. In there, he says human productivity has been sacrificed on the alter of economics and he makes a compelling argument. He says people waste time doing things like packing boxes all day long, things that have an effect on the GDP of a country, but have zero effect on their productivity levels. I agree with him completely. He says the reason why people are not productive is because of the demands the family unit makes on individuals, on men in particular. Men have to engage economically with the world so that they can take care of their families. If men had not married and had children, they would have more time to engage in activities that would be productive and actually be able to positively impact the progress of the human race without just coming to the earth to reproduce and consume then die. I only partially agree with that point. I agree that for the most part, marriages do not prioritize the individual's self actualization, instead what is often prioritized is the rearing of offspring or accumulation of material possessions. There are exceptions though, when you see a couple able to inspire in each other to reach the upper echelons of their potential. Take Einstein who was brilliant at being a scientist and failed miserably at being a husband and father. He had to sacrifice being a father and husband to be productive. His vocation and nature did not allow for his attention to be split. On the other hand, there are couples who achieve amazing things together, people like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying come to mind but also marriages that are conducive to bringing up children who will be an asset to the planet. In his book Restoring Pride, Richard Taylor says:

'Many people... go through life with hardly an original thought, gravitate from one pleasure or amusement to another; gain a livelihood doing what someone else has assigned; flee boredom as best as they can; marry and beget children; and then, without having made to slightest difference of any unique significance, die and decay like any animal.'

I believe in the concept of 'sui generis'; that individuals, when allowed to be able to express their full individuality will be individuals of their own kind. That is the key to being productive. In Opera's book, The path made clear, Deepak Chopra's word for this is 'harbam' which speaks to our unique gifts. The truly productive people are the people who have tapped into their harbam. People like Nikola Tesla, Leonardo da Vinci or even organisations such as Google and Apple. They are the Peter Thiel, Zero to One, people. The people who move from 0 to 1 by doing something new instead of moving from 1 to n by doing something that has already been done before. Tom Bilyeu likes saying 'I believe there is always room for the best'. Upon first hearing this, I was blown away but when I spent time thinking about it, I realised that there was one problem with his statement. It encourages us to fight over the same piece of pie, to swim in packed red oceans as opposed to empty blue oceans (Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim). I would like to rephrase his statement. I believe that there is always room for you to be unique self. What I do take from Tom's message is that competence and excellence is required, necessary even. In order for you to be productive as your unique self, you have to think for yourself, put in the work and have personal excellence in how you carry out the work. . Richard Taylor describes pride as the justified love in oneself based on personal excellence only and he says that this pride should be restored in individuals by individuals themselves.
'Others can bestow excellence. That must be your work, and yours alone provided you have what it takes to do it'
 This pride can only be justified when we take responsibility over our gifts and use them to become productive. Ayn Rand says in The Fountainhead: 

'Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons- a process of thought. From their simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man- the function of his reasoning mind.'
She also writes:
'It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self respect on personal standards of professional achievement. Its simple to seek substitutes for competence-such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.' 

What I believe has happened is that we have taken limited resources and have somehow inferred from limited finite jobs in an economy mean that ideas too are limited. I believe that ideas are limited at least to the number of people on the earth because each person in their uniqueness is then able to articulate a life unique to themselves and to the world. Then you come across really prolific people like Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk and this just opens the flood gates of ideas. The key is to focus on our own productivity, uniquely expressed, fueled by our unique lived experience. Richard Taylor quotes John Stuart Mill in his book:
'He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties.' 
Or in his own words:
'You have a life to live; that is easy enough. But to create your own life is hard indeed, even though it may be a life of utter simplicity... or you can, if you lack the courage to be different, recline on the soft and comfortable bed of inherited custom and convention, go into an undisturbed sleep there, and let what is unique and precious in you simply die.' 

When Stardusk spoke on how productivity is sacrificed for economics; he wasn't referring to just the grand GDP level but also at the individual level. There is a reticence among the general populace when it comes to productivity because of the way our society is structured. You risk living and dying impecuniously like Nikola Tesla and Vincent van Gogh. Richard Taylor, of course, would consider that a most honourable life. A life truly lived. To him, pride comes solely from productivity and not from the profits gained from said productivity. Fountainhead does a fantastic job of elucidating and expanding on this tension between productivity and economics. Howard Roark (protagonist) and Ellsworth Toohey (arch nemesis) are pinned against each other. Most people are actually like Toohey: value money, prestige, material accumulation over productivity. In Fountainhead Roark says:
'But you see, I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do if I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards- and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.'

Choose your own work. Choose personal excellence. Choose productivity. And as Charles Bukowski says:
' Go all the way... It's the only good fight there is'

NOTES:

1. Restoring Pride by Richard Taylor
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/157392024X/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_tl_nq9uEbPJ0C19B
    https://www.takealot.com/restoring-pride/PLID41483443/reviews

2. The path made clear by Oprah Winfrey
    https://www.amazon.com/path-made-clear-discovering-direction/dp/1250307503
    https://www.takealot.com/the-path-made-clear/PLID54547376

3. The Rabbit Hole by Thinking Ape
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LvRriRtWqk8t=338s

4. Zero to One by Peter Thiel
   https://www.amazon.com/zero-to-one-notes-startups-future/dp/0804139296
   https://www.takealot.com/zero-to-one/PLID35409108

5. Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
   https://www.amazon.com/fountainhead-ayn-rand/dp/0451191153
   https://www.takealot.com/the-fountainhead/PLID34463398

6. Blue OceanStrategy by W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
    https://www.amazon.com/blue-ocean-strategy-uncontested-competition/dp/1591396190
  

Potential by Jordan Peterson

In a TED talk, Jordan Peterson was speaking on human potential. The last part of the talk was so encouraging, I had to put it down in print. He said:

'The idea is: if you follow the thing that manifests itself to you as interesting, it will lead you through adversity. It will lead you to do things that are difficult but not beyond your capacity because it is tempered for that. What will happen is that as you hit yourself against the world, pursuing what you are interested in; you will tap yourself into alignment. Your molecules and internal structure will become non-contradictory, like the internal structure of a jewel which is something that reflects light that makes you hard and durable and able to bear the terrible conditions of existence without becoming corrupt'

Note:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLeWutitFM

Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini

Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan Experience spoke about how there are three levels people engage with the world. There is childhood, the tribe and the individual. Timoteo, the protagonist in the book, is better understood in this way. I think he is stuck in the tribe part of his life and his unhappiness or general dissatisfaction with life is due to this. Every decision he has made: becoming a surgeon, getting married, dutiful husband, devoted son and doting father have been what society has asked of him. He has willingly obliged until now. He finds that his life is rather stifling. He has an affair with Talia, a woman life dealt a bad hand to. She doesn't expect much from life and doesn't expect much from him either. He constantly degrades her in his mind, calling her a whore, prostitute and synonyms ad nauseum. He does this because it's the only way he can live with himself. He has to believe she is less than in his mind so he can justify his treatment of her. He treats her with contempt and yet he is the one who continues returning to her time and time again. She is generally very apathetic and so she hardly chases him. He is drawn to her because she is a conduit for him to become himself; to enter the third stage. Engaging with the world as an individual requires you to deal with all aspects of yourself including the Jungian shadow self. In the words of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, 'the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.' In order for Timoteo to actualize in the individual stage, he has to contend with his shadow self. Eckhart Tolle says 'Whatever you accept completely, you go beyond'. He has to come vis-à-vis with his own malevolence, to wrestle with it and emerge transformed on the other side. He had to become meek as described by Jordan Peterson; to be fully aware of one's propensity for violence and choose not to exercise it. It is to carry a metaphorical sword and be able to competently wield it but choose to keep it in its sheath. 

Timoteo's  maturity as an individual spells destruction for Talia but there was a willingness in her as well. She seems to have given herself to him as a sacrifice. She knew she would die but dying for his becoming gave her little life meaning. As though her mortality was immortalized through him. It reminds me of a paragraph I read in Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns:

'Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.'

Esther Perel (Author of The Mating Game and The State of Affairs) is known to say 'sex is not something you do, it is a place you go to'. Similarly, Ayn Rand wrote:

'Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.'

It then comes as no surprise that Timoteo and Talia's relationship is a sexual one. Necessarily. Sex is a fundamental way to access our deepest selves, to somehow manipulate the ether, to transcend, to enter liminal spaces. The song Holy Room by Somi encapsulates this whole idea. When you slow down and pay attention during sex,you notice the shift. It hits you that you have crossed over a rubicon and are forever changed. This is the place where you take off your shoes; not just to honour the other person who is helping you peel back the layers and reveal your hidden self but also to honour yourself by being aware and learning things about yourself it would be hard to otherwise learn.

NOTES:

[1] Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Move-Margaret-Mazzantini/dp/1400034663

[2] A Thousand Splendid suns by Khaled Hosseini

https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Splendid-Suns-Khaled-Hosseini/dp/159448385X

https://www.takealot.com/a-thousand-splendid-suns/PLID4610591

[3] Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

https://www.amazon.com/Mating-Captivity-Unlocking-Erotic-Intelligence/dp/0060753641

https://www.takealot.com/mating-in-captivity-unlocking-erotic-intelligence/PLID34707221

[4] The State of Affairs by Esther Perel

https://www.takealot.com/the-state-of-affairs-rethinking-infidelity/PLID44117598

https://www.amazon.com/State-Affairs-Rethinking-Infidelity/dp/006322583

[5] Joe Rogan Experience #1208- Jordan Peterson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vleFt88Hm8s

[6] Somi- Holy Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFxVi_bolg

The people in the trees by Hanya Yanagihara

I chose this book for two reasons mainly. The first being that, A Little Life, another title from the same author was simply remarkable and secondly, I am in a season of my life where I am thoroughly obsessed with trees. This was sparked by Richard Powers, The Overstory, a book so intricately interwoven around trees with characters from various walks of life. A redemptive book for mankind because it reminds us that there are still human beings who are able to see the trees for the trees. They are able to see beyond the ecoservices trees provide and see another part of awe-inspiring creation just as they too are. They afford trees the reverence that human beings afford each other. The people in the trees however leans on the side of irreverence. There is one particular theme that I wanted to concentrate on from the book. The inability for human beings to tread lightly on the planet. 

Norton Perina travels to U'ivu, a remote Micronesian island looking for a tribe that has not been seen in a long time. Norton and his companions find the tribe but also make another discovery. They realise that the members of the tribe are able to live to never-been-heard-of ages such as 170. This is owed to a rare species of turtle that the tribe consumes during a particular ceremony. The turtles are only found in a single lake in the deepest parts of the jungle. When their time on the island is up; Norton kills and sneaks off with one of the turtles so he could carry out more research on the inexplicable lifespan of the tribe. Norton returns to the states, sets up lab and conducts a study on rats to see if their lifespan would be prolonged as well. Norton's research becomes successful but before he publishes, Tallent (a U'ivuan anthropologist) asks Norton to not publish his findings because it would change everything. Norton publishes regardless and it starts a cascade of unfavourable changes. U'ivu was once a jungle full of lush, verdant plants, teeming with life where the communities were foraging, had a few needs and lived communally and it all completely changed. 

This is what Norton said when he described how the island changed: 

'Shall I tell you of the years of feckless, fruitless, desperate attempts to recreate the effect using every sort of turtle on the planet? Of months waiting for the mice to continue beyond their natural lifespan, and then, upon watching them die, beginning anew, a new Hawaiian sea turtle, a new leatherback turtle, a new Galapos tortoise? Shall I tell you about trying to re-create the effect using every animal, every plant, every fungus, that could be harvested from Ivu'ivu? The sloths, the hogs, the spiders, the vuakas, the toucans, the parrots, the hunonos, the manamas, the kanavas, the weird lizardlike things, the fuzzy gourds, the palm leaves, the seedpods? Shall I tell you how the island was stripped of everything, whole forests razed, whole fields of mushrooms and orchids and ferns picked like fat red strawberries and shiny green lettuces and loaded onto the helicopters that were now able to land directly on the island because so many trees had been felled that there was open space aplenty?

Shall I tell you how there are really no new stories in cases like these: how the men turned to alcohol, how the women neglected their handiwork, how they grew fatter and coarser and lazier, how the missionaries plucked them from their houses as easily as one would pick an overripe apple from a branch? Shall I tell you of the venereal diseases that seemed to come from nowhere but, once introduced, never left? Shall I tell you how I witnessed these things myself, how I kept returning and returning, long after the grant money had disappeared, long after the people had lost interest, long after the island had gone from being an Eden to becoming what it was, what it is: just another Micronesian ruin, once so full of hope, now somehow distasteful and embarrassing like a beautiful woman who has grown fleshy and sparse-haired and moustached?'

An entire ecosystem was ruined in the name of profit. Beauty and simplicity were sacrificed in the name of profit. Human beings value things for their apparent utility and how much of that utility can be commodified. This kind of thinking though is pervasive and meanders into everything else including other people i.e. slavery. In Karen Joy Fowler's book, We are all completely beside ourselves, another book that navigates the relationship between human beings and nature (in this case other primates), she says something that I found profound. How the most important part of the words human being is the being part not the human part. The other inhabitants of our planet should be valued too, primarily, for their beingness. 

Joe Rogan has had Forrest Galante on his show a couple of times. There are things they've spoken about on the show that have tied in beautifully with the theme being discussed here. Forrest Galante spends most of his time exploring the world searching for extinct animals or animals that haven't been seen in a while. Interestingly, on the show he describes how he recently 'found' the Galapos turtle on an expedition that hadn't been seen in 113 years. Human beings are largely responsible for the extinction of a large number of species. The North American buffalo(bison) were hunted so the Sioux would be starved into submission. Even though the dodo was not hunted out of existence as we were once led to believe, human beings still played a huge role in its extinction. The Dutch sailors brought rats and other animals that ate dodo eggs and competed with the dodo for food. There was also a mass exportation of wood from Mauritius which deforested the dodo's habitat and left the animals exposed to other animals and harsh weather conditions. The silverback gorilla in Rwanda almost became extinct because the genocides were driving the Tutsi into the forest; man and beast could not live in close proximity to each other and beast suffered as a result. The list goes on but these are but a few examples. Joe and Rogan were discussing how the population of feral pigs in Hawaii have grown exponentially and how this has major implications for agriculture, indigenous plants and other animals like the mosquito. All these pigs can be traced to pigs bought from oversees by settlers. 

Even when human beings try to help, they usually hurt particularly when they are ill-informed about a matter. In Karen's aforementioned book, she wrote about how in 1979, more than a thousand seal pups were sprayed with permanent red dye by crew members from the Sea Shepherd who thought that by ruining the seals' pelts, they could save the seals from hunters. Sure their pelts were destroyed but this also made them easier to be seen by predators. I've heard that sharks are especially attracted to high-contrast colours. As I've previously stated, however, there are redemptive moments for the human race. There are people, who are working very hard in conservation, but these are people who are not just acting impulsively but are considerate in the work that they are doing. There was a YouTube video that trended where the audience was led to believe that a polar bear in the artic was spray painted with a red cross. This was a gimmick to draw attention to how polar bears are endangered and to raise funds towards their conservation. It is with great relief to most of us that no polar bears were spray painted. Joe asked Forrest if he has to choose between seeing an endangered species dead or not ever seeing it even though it existed; which would he choose? Forrest, in a heartbeat, said he would rather not ever see it as long as it existed. This is such a lesson in humility especially in our 'if it can't be measured, it doesn't exist' world. At the end of his last Stanford lectures, Robert Sapolsky, shared a legend among archaeologists that has remained with me since. Legend has it that when archaeologists excavate a site, they don't excavate the entire area. They leave half of the site for the next archaeologists. When we are able to consider others and not want to destroy everything in one fell swoop because we can; when everything does not have to be commodified, when other things can just be let be without interference or opinion really. Even though Christopher Ryan's words in Civilized to Death ring true, 'the garden of Eden has been long paved over', we still can tread lightly on this sacred land that is our planet.  

Notes:

1. The people in the trees by Hanya Yanagihara

    https://www.amazom.com/dp/0345803310/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_AovmEbZFVS87P

    https://www.takealot.com/the-people-in-the-trees/PLID38334659

2. The Overstory by Richard Powers

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/03936363552X/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_ssvmEb4BNTPV7

    https://www.takealot.com/the-overstory/PLID5421309

3. We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/0142180823/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_AxvmEb4Y360Y5

    https://www.takealot.com/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-ebook/PLID38334659

4. Joe Rogan Experience: Forrest Galante #1403

    https://youtu.be/tCRjzlfyOE4

5. Civilized to death by Christopher Ryan

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/1451659105/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_9AvmEbWK26IQ2

    https://www.takealot.com/civilized-to-death/PLID42027122

6. Robert Sapolsky lecture on Individual Differences

    https://youtu.be/PpDqIWUtAw

A billion wicked thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

When Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory mentioned A Billion Wicked Thoughts in two interviews- with Richard Dawkins and Eric Weinstein- my interest was piqued. One of the most contentious topics, that riles feminists up is that men and women are fundamentally different. The argument has been that beyond physical strength, men and women are the same. They have the same brain and software, the only difference lying in their socialization. Yeah, this is not the case. As much as I understand the rationale behind the desire for this to be true; it simplifies the pursuit of gender equality. The data, however, does not support this. Even Steven Pinker on the Joe Rogan Experience said that there is an incorrect assumption that 'women's rights depend on men and women being indistinguishable' and that 'fairness is not the same as sameness'. Men and women are different at the evolutionary level therefore giving your daughter a toy gun to play with won't necessarily make her disinterested in dolls and trinkets. 

A Billion Wicked Thoughts bring these stark differences to the fore paying close attention to human desire. What made this book, in my opinion so revolutionary, is that because sex is such a taboo topic; people have hardly told the truth about what they find desirable. When people have been asked about desire, their responses haven't reflected reality. People have provided more vanilla and socially acceptable responses. The authors worked around this by actually looking at what people searched for on the internet and what they spent their money on to illustrate how different men and women actually are. This book revealed 'what's on the other end of everyone's fork' regarding desire and this review covers some of those findings.

Baby David Reimer's penis was burnt off accidentally by a doctor during a medical procedure. The parents along with the doctor decided it would be best to reassign David's gender and raise him as Brenda Reimer. The whole thing backfired because, regardless how much the parents tried to socialize him as a girl, it didn't work. David was given dolls to play with but he was disinterested in them and wanted to play with cars and guns. His parents came clean to him and he decided to revert back to being male and lived the rest of his life as a man. Gender is hard wired in us and it is not just a matter of socialization. We just have different proclivities. 

When it comes to porn, men prefer images and women prefer stories (erotica). Men would also exchange resources for pictures of women's body parts. Think subscriptions and strip clubs. This is not exclusively human though, a male research rhesus monkey (Wolfgang) traded juice for pictures of female perinea. The body parts that men are drawn to in porn are breasts, butt and feet. The preferred breast size is depended on the specific culture the male was raised in. Smaller feet are preferred by all men because smaller feet allude to the presence of estrogen (female sex hormone). Estrogen is linked to healthy child bearing. Pregnant women have huge feet to make them unattractive to other men. In some cultures, foot-binding is practiced to curb foot growth. Cinderella was not a size 10; only dainty feet fit in glass slippers presented by a dashing prince. 

Half a decade ago I read The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf and in there was a chapter dedicated to the cosmetic industry. I remember marveling at the number of zeroes behind the number that is spent by women on cosmetics in the states. The book was written in 1991 and the number was still staggering in 2014, when I read the book. It turns out that most of that spending is needless. Women are wired to seek irresistibility and also knowing that men prefer younger women; women go under the knife and spend a chunk of their disposable income on cosmetics. Here is the conflicting part though. Men are cued to seek the authentic, so a rhinoplasty or any form of augmentation in the name of irresistibility land flat. Unless, the male can be fooled convincingly that all is real. Another interesting thing is that men have been blamed for women wanting to be below-healthy-BMI thin, like the women featured in Cosmopolitan and Vogue. However, the audience of those magazines are women, not men. Not only that; but the data showed that men prefer thicker women to thin, with a low waist-to-hip ratio. This thickness is called ornamentation where parts of the female anatomy are over sized. Youth is key because men are wired to be attracted to females with the highest number of child bearing years left; therefore men prefer adolescent ornamentation over adult ornamentation. Their wiring actually drives them to seek long-term relationships where children can be raised successfully. This would explain why in South Africa right now, ama-2000 (colloquial name given to those born around the second millennium), are wreaking havoc in these streets.

Female ornamentation is found in species where there is a greater variety in the quality of females and it evolved as a result of female competition for non-genetic benefits (food, protection, shelter and in our case the Randelas) from males. The most attractively ornamented females received the most benefits from males. People can remove the word ‘beauty’ from the title, do away with the bikini section, ask probing questions, add the word ‘empowering’ to the context; pageants still and will forever be, by their very nature, female competition of ornamentation for resources. Most women’s porn sites have political messages. Just as pageants are now considered empowering, so are female porn sites. It seems women put the word ‘empowering’ to justify participation in things society disapproves of.

The little blue pill has been a game changer with regards to men’s sexual health. There is no equivalent pink pill for women though because Viagra does not work on women. For women, there is a difference between physical and psychological arousal and for men, there isn’t. All arousal roads lead to happy endings. Women can be physically aroused and yet psychologically disgusted with the stimulus. The psychological part is indispensable in arousal and enjoyment.

Men have very low chances of reproduction which is why they engage in riskier behaviour and travel more. Women, on the other hand, have a very high chance of reproduction and generally seek safe, secure environments to be able to rear children in. It should then not come as a surprise that Sir Edmund Hillary, Neil Armstrong and The Crocodile Hunter were all men. For the most part, it doesn’t seem like women were explicitly denied certain vocations (although this has happened). Most women prefer to stay at home or to work in air conditioned spaces that are similar to home conditions.

Moving on to romantic novels. There is always an alpha male hero or a beta male who becomes an alpha. The hero’s occupation is always very masculine and high status. He is either a doctor or a sheriff or king etc. He is never a hairdresser or a nurse. If the heroine is rich, the hero must be richer. The hero has to be competent in everything he does, he is only allowed to flounder in the love department where the heroine will gladly be of assistance. The authors include the findings of a certain study that revealed how most men would date a woman who can’t drive and yet, most women would not date a man who can’t drive. Also, not surprisingly, women prefer their heroes older. An older hero is well established, he is adept and has accumulated a lot of resources.

‘Umuntu umthola emuntwini’ is South African vernacular for a person (with whom to mate) is found in the arms of someone else. According to this book, the first person to say that was most likely a woman. Women are attracted to men who are already in relationships because it increases his mating value. He has officially met another woman’s stamp of approval. Men, though, often prefer that other men had less interest in a potential partner so that leaves her accessible. ‘The male brain is designed for sexual jealousy. Men are suspicious about whom a woman has slept with and frequently press their partner on how many times she’s previously had sex; most women are savvy enough to round the number down. Likewise, the female brain is designed for emotional jealousy. Women usually push their partners to reveal how many times he’s previously been in love. Men are often foolish enough to provide a figure other than zero.’ Turns out women are generally accepting of a man’s past physical philandering, as long as he wasn’t philandering emotionally. Women perceive catching their partner watching porn as a betrayal and yet they don’t think they are betraying their partner when reading romance novels. Women don’t want their partners investing their resources in other women and also porn is perceived as a male's loss of emotional interest in them.

Turns out, the societal phallocentrism has very little to do with women. Phallus size concerns are male concerns. In romantic novels, women never mention the size of the hero’s phallus, male authors always do. Eye tracking research shows that males look at other men’s crotches more than women do. 45% of men want bigger penises and only 15% of women do. This may explain the dick-pic phenomenon. Put that away, Guy, no one wants to see that. As a side, gay men have longer penis than straight men. This must not go down too well for straight men. In pornotopia, there is also a mania around black men. Their endowment is a fascination to men in general. Also, men get aroused when see their partner having sex with someone else (cuckoldry) and this is due to a sexual cue called sperm competition. Sperm competition is defined in the book as a ‘variety of physiological and behavioural adaptations that enable a male’s sperm to compete head-to-head in the battle to impregnate a female’s egg. It’s believed that the penis is actually shaped to shovel other men’s sperm out. The reason why a man becomes flaccid after ejaculation is so that he doesn’t shovel his own sperm out.  

I watched a YouTube video by Barbarossa on hybristophilia. Hybristophiliacs are people who are sexually aroused and attracted to people who have committed gruesome crimes such as murder and rape. This pathology explains why serial killers such as Ted Bundy receive love letters from a plethora of women. Ted Bundy, I recall Barbarossa saying, had female fans at his court proceedings. A man who killed so many women had a large number of female supporters. There is a weird relationship women have with violence. Sure, hybristophiliacs may be at the tails of the bell curve but it seems most women have fantasies that have a violent element to them. Another risqué topic when it comes to arousal is related to forbidden acts. The psychological term for the engagement in forbidden acts is called transgression. Sexual arousal and danger light up the same part of the brain, the sympathetic nervous system which is why transgression is so appealing to both sexes.

Human beings are one of a few species that engage in sex beyond reproduction. This is called extended sexuality. Basically, women have different sexual behaviours during ovulation and when they are not ovulating. During ovulation, women value short-term interests over long-term interests. During ovulation, women are attracted to the masculine, good looks and dominance in men. They dress more provocatively, flirt more and generally move around more.

In an earlier paragraph, I mentioned how small feet are favoured by men and are an indication for the presence of estrogen which is a cue for good health, energy and future reproductive potential. The same does not apply with testosterone however, as prolonged exposure to high levels of testosterone have been linked with poor long term health. The interest is in the immediate effects of testosterone which signal dominance. Height is also associated with high levels of testosterone which is why women swoon before tall men. Height is a recurring characteristics required by most women during mate selection.

The authors differentiate between two types of dominance, social and sexual dominance. Social dominance is very fluid and flexible and sexual dominance usually isn’t. The male Geladas (Simien mountain monkey) have an hour glass shaped patch of skin on their chest which increases or decreases in vividness according to the males social status at the time. Lordosis and Intromission are the sexual roles that female and male rats play respectively during mating. Lordosis is female submission and intromission is male dominance; akin to the ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ in the gay community. Dominance is important in that it increases the levels of testosterone which increase the speed to effectually convince women to engage in sex which exposes the male to more sexual partners. Alpha males, then, have the greatest sex drive of all males.

Many people are under the impression that BDSM is about coercion when it is actually about power and the exchange of it between two people. People who are socially dominant (CEOs, Ivy League deans, stockbrokers) prefer to be sexually submissive. There is a difference between BDSM and coercion. In BDSM, a crop is used and in coercion, a knife. While BDSM emphasizes relationship, coercion is centred on a threat. The aim of BDSM is dominance and control while its sexual humiliation and helplessness in coercion. BDSM and coercion are not the same thing.

There are two psychological cues for men with regards to desire, namely authenticity and novelty. Authenticity explains why men are always concerned with whether a woman had an orgasm during intercourse or not. Men value authentic orgasms because they think it promotes fidelity. The reasoning behind this is if a woman feels pleasure with a certain man, then she is likely to stay with said man and keep coming back for more. There is also the gossip element where if word spreads of his sexual game being off then that decreases his mating value. Men like novelty because of sperm preservation. Novelty spurs men to sow their oats. Novelty is the reason why web cam girls make their most money in the first week or why first year varsity females are all the rage in the first couple of months on campus.

The authors speak of the allure of the Mona Lisa, the painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which is that it gives off two conflicting visual cues. She has lips formed into a straight line but her eyes tell a different story. I think this is his genius though. He didn’t do it the other way around. We are so used to seeing people give us the fake smile accompanied by dead eyes. Nothing intriguing about it; it is rather off-putting. But they mention the Mona Lisa because this sort of alchemy can be achieved, rather has been achieved by manipulating the various cues to create a fascination in the observer. It is akin to Sage Agastya’s Lopamudra who was ‘assembled from the most beautiful parts’ or like Pygmalion’s Galatea. It seems like history is littered with men trying to construct the perfect woman. This is the reason men find Hentai appealing; anime that is created according to the desirability specifications of men.

The same alchemy that has been achieved through the Mona Lisa has been achieved in the desire industry. Transsexual porn is classified as straight men speciality. The cues that are triggered in men is that the transsexual has body parts of a woman but also the presence of a penis. Another example of this is paranormals. Paranormals (werewolves and vampires) are a huge success; Stephanie Meyer who has mastered the incorporation of paranormals in her twilight series has made an insane amount of money because of it. Vampires set off all sorts of fireworks in women. They are usually ‘old money’ rich, older, alphas, fast, strong, tall and usually find the heroine adorable and irresistible. Similarly, werewolves are strong, alphas, loyal, competent and did I mention that they usually find the heroine adorable and irresistible?

There is also a philia towards the facial money shot in porn. It is believed that three cues are triggered here; sperm completion, sperm preservation and authentic pleasure.

Men are also drawn to transformation fiction. A man undergoes some traumatic experience and then reluctantly becomes a woman. Once the man comes to terms with being a woman, he takes to the role with ardour. The woman’s body meet the ardour standards of men; young, promiscuous and mainly concerns herself with shopping and dressing up. The cues that are triggered here are female pleasure, female anatomy and youth. I think that transformation fiction, hentai and transsexual porn do not conflict with the male authenticity cue because there is no deception behind them, males are fully in the know throughout the entire engagement with these materials.

There is a critical period in a man’s youth where the sexual experiences that take place pretty much shape and colour his sexual experiences for the rest of his life. Post adolescent imprinting, men consider everything outside of those sexual experiences deviant, disgusting or dangerous. Even though men can be easily aroused, his imprinting limits his sexuality. Women, on the other hand, are far more plastic sexually but there are more cues to satisfy. The authors hoped that unpacking desire would inspire more creativity when it comes to catering to the different cues of men and women. By pulling back the curtain on the human machinations of desire, we are able to better understand one another and are able to steer this great turbulent sea of human interaction with a little more skill. 

Notes:
1. A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the internet tells us about sexual desire
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452297877/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_tl_4XumEb8ASEA26

2. Impact theory
    https://youtu_be/XbKXeVOUQYY (Eric Weinstein)
    https://youtu_be/irSlpGe5yoQ (Richard Dawkins)

3. The Beauty Myth
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060512180/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awdb_.ebmEbR9TFFHK
    https://www.takealot.com/the-beauty-myth/PLID34211983

4. Hybristophilia: The female attraction to violence
    https://youtu_be/Gdyy0BArH74