Posted on 10/18/2012 4:14:34 AM PDT by IbJensen
Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female—specifically, her eggs and womb.
The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women’s reproductive rights rests not only on a woman’s ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes 40 long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women will always face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies. But those demands are rising in unexpected ways, and from unexpected people.
Historically, it was understood that sex created babies. Cultural scripts thus emerged that valued and preferred certain types of sex and male-female relations. The profession of prostitution has always been highly stigmatized for this reason. As we’ve learned the hard way, when female prostitutes engage with their clients, fatherless children can be born, growing up distinctly disadvantaged.
By far, men have always been the main buyers of sexual access to fertile females. Women virtually never pay for sexual access to either gender. Women and girls make up the overwhelming majority of prostitutes and escorts, and men overwhelmingly make up the clientele. This is true for every human culture, in every period in history. And it has everything to do with reproduction and the scarcity of the fertile female.
Rape is another example of unbalanced behavior between the genders. Although women do rape, men force sexual access against their victims’ will much more often—and their victims are predominantly young (as in fertile) women. Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig T. Palmer in their 2000 book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion describe rape (and prostitution) as “gene promotion strategies” that men use when legitimate, consensual sex is not possible. A man that is unable to engage a fertile female in legitimate consensual sex may face the dilemma of using force, monetary incentives or facing extinction.
We teach our daughters a script of warning so they can anticipate these established sexual predators. Oprah broadcasts a list of safety tips for women to avoid them. Parents forbid their teenage daughters from a whole range of activities where her sexual safety may be threatened. We make movies about these predators. We have derogatory names for them. We have a sense of who they are, where they lurk, and what to do to avoid them. We do these things because we care about the health of women and know that their well-being, and the well-being of children, depends on whether they conceive babies in the context of love and companionship.
But now there are new predators on the scene, for whom we do not have a script. There are new characters eager to exploit our daughters’ bodies, who enjoy unsullied reputations, passing detection even as they blatantly hunt for eggs and wombs with checkbooks in hand. And historically they have been the people women should fear the least.
These new players vying for access to young women’s bodies are older or infertile women, and gay men—quite often our friends and members of our family.
A friend of mine, for example, had a bizarre encounter with a regular customer at the restaurant where she waits tables. A middle-aged woman, as politely as she could, asked my friend if she had ever considered becoming an egg donor—and then asked specifically if she would consider becoming her egg donor. Since my friend—Jewish, with blue eyes and straight hair—was apparently a rare catch, this woman wanted her babies.
Another friend of mine was put under a great deal of pressure by her aunt who married in her late thirties and had trouble conceiving. The aunt desperately wanted a child, and preferred to have a genetic relationship with the child, so she aggressively pressured her niece to “donate” eggs to her. If she had agreed, my friend would have become the biological mother of her social cousin.
By neutering ourselves in our youth via contraception and abortion, women have increased the scarcity of the fertile female body, which has increased the demand for it.
Younger women look to older women for guidance and mentorship. They rely on being able to trust their foremothers as sisters in the cause for women’s health. But the increased scarcity of the fertile female body, combined with IVF technology that allows for egg harvesting and surrogacy, creates conflict between generations of women. Older women with more power and resources put their interests ahead of younger women’s and make up for their past mistakes or misfortunes by risking the health and well-being of their successors.
The attack comes from close range—dressed in words of altruism and generosity. The women who seek other women’s children often carried the torch for gender equality, women’s rights, and so many other wins for their side in the gender wars. Out of respect for their ambition and challenge to the glass ceiling, younger women feel pressured to give their children to older women as gestures of appreciation for their life trajectories. Perhaps these women anticipate a similar trajectory for themselves and donate away their children in hopes that someone will do the same for them in the future—a form of paying it forward.
Our gay friends and family members may now also be after our daughters’ bodies. These are the only men in the world we thought we could trust because they weren’t interested in our bodies. That is, until they grew older and discovered they wanted to be parents. Today, more and more often, gay men are using egg donors and surrogates to create motherless children on purpose.
Toleration of these attempts to create families follows a timeline of slipped slopes and fallen barriers. If heterosexual couples can use sperm donors to create children who are separated from their biological fathers, so the logic goes, then lesbians should be able to do the same thing. To them, it’s not biology that matters—kids just need two parents. And if lesbians use sperm donors to create fatherless children, then it’s only equal and fair for gay men to be able to use egg donors and surrogates to create motherless children too. Because again, it’s not biology that matters; kids just need two parents. At present, all those who believe in gender equality rather than gender complementarity are being urged to accept this often violent (against women) form of third-party reproduction.
Proponents of redefining marriage call marriage equality “the civil rights struggle of our time.” TV shows like The New Normal promote surrogacy arrangements with dialogue like “a family is a family, and love is love.” Characters that criticize the use of surrogacy and egg donation are explicitly depicted as unsympathetic, racist, closed-minded bigots.
What these shows (and other memes) do is insist that in order to be a friend to gay people, one must approve, or at least stay neutral toward, all forms of third-party reproduction.
So now, young women must do more than simply defend themselves against aggressive heterosexual males who want to use them for sex. They must also navigate a world filled with new, never-before-seen predators—people they thought they could trust—who aggressively target them for their eggs and wombs.
Not horse pucky. If men were only looking for sexual release, then any woman would do and there are more women in the world than men.
But men aren’t just looking for sexual release no matter what their big head is telling them, their little head is focused on making a baby. Which is why men primarily seek young fertile females as partners and that is a much smaller pool of potentially willing partners.
The biological imperative for women is quite different. Almost all men are fertile right up until they keel over in old age. So it’s not what we look for. Since pregnancy and childrearing leave women vulnerable and disadvantaged because of the significant physical and time investment, we seek partners that have the markers that indicate safety, stability and resources.
What about guuys that have had a vasectomy...did their little heads not know what happened?
Consciously, no - but that's due to current laws and social traditions. Absent such strictures, the subconscious drive that impels the "clients" to act is 100% based on a desire to reproduce. Men would leave behind 50-100 babies (and burdens to the community) every year without a second thought - that's why cultural traditions evolved as they did.
B.S. It is sexual drive, not the drive to reproduce.
Thanks for your response. I agree that the sexual revolution has not been good. I am amazed at the adults who think it’s okay to focus on sexuality so strongly in contemporary presentations on television, on shows kids are going to be watching.
Think about some of the acts on America Has Talent, that wouldn’t have been considered decent for adults ten years ago.
I believe that the scabbard is much more delicate.
LOL! Some religious and cultural forces do indeed work very hard to establish that these two "drives" are not the exact same thing. But human biology does not cooperate with dogma.
The fact that men are attracted to the hottie with all the biological markers of fertility tells you that despite what men think in their big head about scoring and sexual pleasure, the little head is directing them toward procreation, procreation, procreation.
Hollywood and the fashion world have been pushing bony, skinny assed androgynous looking women since Twiggy, yet all the research says men still prefer the “robust package” that signals fertility because it’s HARDWIRED.
You can pretend men don’t have a biological imperative hardwired into their brain or try to wish it away, but intellectual subterfuge doesn’t make biology go away.
You do realize that these are both terms for the exact same thing?
Only liberal morons think they are separate and that you can have your cake and eat it too. As a liberal myth, it's right up there with taxing the 1% to support the 99%.
Hey Lindsey. This is Ron. Say listen, how would you like to go out to dinner Thursday, perhaps see a movie? And say, if I could just impregnate you, it would be a dream come true.
LOL, thanks for playing. Don Pardo, please tell her what her parting gifts are.
They ARE NOT the same thing.
Whether you can grasp it or not, men do have sex without wanting to impregnate someone.
So procreating IS NOT the driving factor.
You’re lost in space here.
Some idiot professor made a comment, and you fell for it hook line and sinker. WRONG!!!!
If your nads weren’t producing the sex hormones of reproduction you would have NO sexual desire. Trying to pretend that sexual desire is unrelated to biological imperative and the REPRODUCTIVE organs that cause that desire just means you flunked biology.
FAIL
One of the saddest things I see in people who have gotten an education, is the lack of common sense in their conclusions.
You, a female, are trying to tell me what my, a male’s, goals are.
Then you tell me that I don’t know what my personal thoughts are, don’t know my own body, don’t know my own physiology, and don’t have the slightest clue about reproduction.
Do you have any idea what your personal take would be, if I told you a woman that I know more about your physiology than you did?
And you term my explanation of what goes through men’s minds, a big FAIL?
LOL, are you ever one seriously confused know-it-all.
Wow... Could you not ever be more mistaken. The most basic of goals in all forms of life whether human, animal or vegetable is to ensure that life continues and our genetic code is passed to a new generation. All this subconscious biology forms the framework for our conscious mind and prewires the paths to the goal in millions of tiny little decisions every hour of every day, some conscious and some not. Yep... Right up to asking little Jennie if she wants to go to the movies.
Are you seriously trying to claim that men are not influenced by the sex hormones produced by their testicles? Are you seriously trying to suggest that the sex drive does not stem from the reproductive organs?
Are seriously trying to claim that a castrated male would have the same sex drive as an uncut male, cause I’m here to tell you that any farm raised gal would tell you that you are full of male bovine excreta.
Of course what men’s brains rationalize and what their gonads intend are different. Divorcing the sex drive from reproduction has been the liberal’s wet dream for decades.
It has produced only the death of innocents, despair and cultural destruction.
Ramius, the issue here is not that biology does or doesn’t provide subliminal ques or desires. Yes it does. The original premise was that every act of sex was driven by the desire to procreate. Sorry, that’s absurd.
As a sixty-one year old male, I can verify for you that procreation is not my personal goal when I have sex.
You folks have got to get off this kick. You’re killing yourselves.
After my daughter was born four days after the bi-centennial of our nation, I had a vasectomy. What’s your explanation for thirty-six years of sex without the ability to have children? Doesn’t that blow just a wee little hole in your claims that we only have sex for procreation? Well, yes it does.
Now please rant on about why I have sex.
You two have sought to take the humanity out of sex.
1. you’re not doing it just because it feels good
2. you’re not doing it for self gratification
3. you’re not doing it just because she’s a cutie and you want her
4. you’re not doing it to enhance your relationship
5. you’re not doing it because you love her, but you don’t want kids yet
You’re just fooling yourself. You really want to procreate, and you’re too stupid to know it.
Give it a rest you two. Your arguments are unsustainable, and verge on the absurd.
Your moronic reply doesn’t warrant a rebuttal on the merits.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2946540/posts?page=38#38
This is true in no small part because the sexual experience is different for men and women.
And all of that has everything to do with biology and reproduction. The species reproduces most abundantly when men try to have sex with as many fertile women as possible. A woman needs to have sex far less often for the species to reach maximum reproduction, because once pregnant there is no reproductive purpose to them having sex. Our genetic code "knows" this and has written the emotions into our programming to motivate us towards maximum reproductive behavior. This means men will want sex far more often than women do, and the natural economic laws of supply and demand determine the rest.
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