Trickle-Down Sociology

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I wanted to try looking at the question of sexual responsibility from another position. Some of the replies I've gotten seem to wonder if I'm letting guys off the hook, by saying women are more responsible for this. I sure as hell don't want to. I'd be happy to live in a world where the capacity to bear children cycled between males and females, or there were no real males or females: we could all get pregnant. In such a world, sexual mores would be equivilent for both sides.

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But trying to be politically correct here is cultural suicide. It is trying to shape the world in the image of what would be "fair" or "good" from some point of view that has nothing to do with either biology, sociology, or history. It's the Liberal equivalent of Trickle-Down Economics: looks good on paper. It sure SHOULD work. And it never has, and never will.

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It's "Awakening your Kundalini Backwards" or trying to create a world in the image of your theories. A little thought experiment, please.

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Let's say that you have a hundred kids. Fifty boys, fifty girls. Basically law-abiding, but otherwise healthy, frisky kids. The intent is to minimize the number of illegitimate births. You can have absolute control over forty-nine of these kids. What strategy will produce the smallest number of bastards?

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Seems pretty obvious to me that if you can control forty-nine of those girls, you've pretty much got it licked. Only one girl will have the risk of getting pregnant, right? On the other hand, what if you controlled forty-nine of the boys? That one loose cannon penis could impregnate every single girl over the course of a year. Easily. This, to me, is a no-brainer. It is easier by far to control fifty eggs than fifty billion sperm. The numbers just don't work any other way, and I think this is the reason that I can't think of a single culture...screw that, a single PARENT who puts MORE pressure on the boys than they do on the girls. Regardless of the fact that it's "not fair," any other approach simply doesn't work.

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Let's turn this around. I take the position that the balancing "unfairness" is that males are expected to die to protect women and children. In what culture, on what world, can you imagine a scenario in which males refused to go into combat unless an equal number of females were in COMBAT positions at their sides? Again, I know of no where, at no time in history, anywhere in the world, in which this would work. The fact that this is "not fair" to boys is both untrue and irrelevant.

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The reproductive scenario only seems unfair to women. Try to turn this upside down by thinking you can control the situation best by putting equal strictures on both groups, and you are fighting a mighty force in human survival, the male urge to screw everything in sight and then move on. You don't fight this, you USE it, by forcing males to commit to their sexual partners. To finish school, to become civilized, to be able to present themselves to the parents, to make sufficient resources to support a family. Otherwise, the girls keep their legs crossed. And so far as I can see, you can actually make this approach work, and it has worked, all over the world. The middling alternative is to say that both sides are equally responsible.

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That takes an extraordinary amount of conscious control, and most human beings, male or female, just don't have it. Right now, much of popular culture spreads the idea that women can and should be as sexually aggressive as men. The result is an avalanche of illegitimate births. Single mothers raising male children, who then have no models at all of how to be fathers. Who go out and perpetuate the cycle. The society begins to break down.

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Yes, I think that women are, in this sense, a civilizing force. I can just barely see a way to make the situation equal...if we could reset the human reproductive default so that you had to WANT to have babies, you had to THINK about it to get pregnant. But even then, you'd have to deal with the wiring in women's heads relating to the infamous "reproductive clock." If you think you have trouble not heading to the refrigerator for a midnight snack, if you think people's unconscious eating gets their diets into trouble, you ain't seen nothing when unconscious "forgetting to take the pill" or "we were just too turned on to put on that rubber" kicks in.

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Fair? Unfair? If women don't hold the line on this, the entire culture dies, taking women and men BOTH with it. If men don't accept their responsibility to take primary responsibility for defense of the homeland, BOTH men and women die, and take society with it.

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It's not about what we want. It's about what works. From my point of view, you'd actually have to change some very basic things about human biology and psychology to make this work differently, and thinking "it's not fair" doesn't pull the plow. You are literally damaging the very children you're trying to help.

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This is definitely related to the feeling many black people have expressed that "blaming" poor blacks for having unprotected sex, or babies out of wedlock, is some kind of genocide. That's the short-term view. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. The bonded human family seems to be the bedrock of human society, and has been since the cave. The extended family is great, fantastic, terrific. But about 95% of what we see out there, if not more, is pair-bonded relationships as the bedrock. Yes, an expanded tribe should be able to care for orphaned children. Yes, uncles and grandfathers should be able to help boys become men. But the instant you let those reproducing males off the hook and say: "you're not needed!" too damned many of them say: "Yep! I'm out!" and take off.

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And the result? Sons who have problems accepting responsibility for their own children, or see no need to. Girls who get pregnant before they've finished their education, who seek from random men the support and affection and attention that they should have gotten from their fathers. And I've seen this pattern countless times. So: no, I won't back down from my position that black culture needs to force its boys to take responsibility for their children, and its girls to abandon the insane belief they should be as sexually aggressive as men.

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And I won't back down from my position that anyone who thinks you can manage reproduction as efficiently by equalizing the pressure on males and females. Unless you can apply 100% pressure, you will fail. It takes one guy to impregnate a hundred women. And it is the children who will suffer for your lovely little social theories, or sense of what is "right" and "fair."

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Call it trickle-down reproduction. Yeah. I think I can point to that as an equivalent insanity to the conservative theories of distribution of wealth. It will never work, and you're damaging the people you're trying to help. It ignores basic realities of human behavior: a certain irreducible percentage of the human race are ASSHOLES. The same percentage of rich as poor. Of males as females. Trying to set up a society that doesn't take this into account is madness.

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I wonder how this would apply to our individual lives? Something along the line of: "a certain irreducible percentage of the time, I am going to act like an asshole. How can I protect myself, my family, and my community from that?"

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I suppose that would be setting up a budget, and giving your spouse access to the financial books. In that way, unless you are both assholes on the same schedule, there's gonna be hell to pay if you're raiding the cookie jar for expensive toys, or lottery tickets. You have family councils in which your children are encouraged to call you on your bullshit. You look at the results you're getting in all three major arenas of your life, and allow others to judge you by them as well. You vote for laws that create painful consequences for asshole behavior. Not because you're an asshole, but because you will spend a certain percentage of your waking hours exploring your asshole potential. And if you're like me, you've got a lot.

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You just don't set society up so that only angels can function within it. Shame and blame works great on children, and you don't remove those things, don't remove the emotional or physical pain from the feedback loop until their logical faculties have evolved to the point that they behave primarily on the basis of reason and logic. And in truth, how many of us really do that more than 50% of the time? Pain is a great teacher.

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Marching up the Chakras, or up Maslow's Heirarchy, FIRST set up your rules to control the basic animal urges and behaviors. Then set up strictures that provide physical pain for violation of survival principles. As the organism or society evolves, move that up to emotional pain: shame, shunning, guilt. And then logic. The last step...the VERY last step is the being who is self-motivated, who performs "right action" without outside stimulus, who is "beyond good and evil."

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Otherwise you get people who function as Aleister Crowley suggests: who find joy specifically in rebelling against authority, rather than in responding to their most basic nature.

I remember my mother believing that I loved Toni because she was white. That, in essence, I was rebelling against a bi-racial mother. (This was hysterical to me: Toni and my mom were the same skin tone.)

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Later, I had a relative accuse me, indirectly, of marrying Tananarive out of...wait for it...rebellion against my light-skinned mother. Wow. Can't win for losing, can I?

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Sure I can. These people are telling me why THEY make choices. They're projecting themselves into the external world. I chose Toni because she was the first person in the world who believed in me, who really supported me in my dream of being a writer, bless her. She could have been black, Asian, or a Martian. After that marriage broke up, I wondered whether I had deliberately avoided black women, and went out of my way to date them. That didn't work out well at all, and I went back to my pattern of simply choosing partners based on shared interests. That meant primarily white ladies, and I was happy with that. Then, quite by "accident" I met Tananarive, and found someone with whom I had an insane amount in common with, while maintaining those delicious differences that make the relationship "pop". Frankly, I wouldn't have been ready for her in college. Toni was perfect for me then, and I love her still. But Tananarive represents who I am today more fully than anyone I've ever met. And she makes me want to be a better man. Her family was all about Blackness, while mine was shamed and troubled by it. I never had any support for that aspect of my Self, and was forced to dig deep to find my bedrock in just being human, or just existing. Anyone who knows me, or reads this blog, knows that there is still a mountain of unprocessed bullshit around race that I shoved aside into locked rooms, and am now processing a shovel-full at a time.

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But taking joy specifically in a motion against others? What the hell is that? Where are YOU in that? You are allowing others to define you just as much if you rebel as if you conform. Exactly the same thing. Rather, just seek to discover who you are. You will be pleased and disturbed to see how often you want the same things, and conform to the same behaviors, as your parents. And in other ways, you will be very different. And that would be true if you weren't raised by them at all. Or if you were adopted. Or if you chose your parents out of the phone book, at random. Certain behaviors and qualities just WORK, and if you move away from pain and toward pleasure, you'll find yourself doing many of the same things other human beings do, and it ain't because you were programmed. It's because certain behaviors work, and others don't, and we have to be careful to throw the baby out with the bath-water when we seek adulthood, or social change.

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The key of Joy is finding the truth of Self, and seeking to live that truth every day. Crowley obsessed with not being like his family. That is the adolescent position. Adulthood is something very different.