Male-female courtship advantages

[al8]

I've been following the anarchist mr1001nights on youtube for a while now. He has focused on anarchist theory but also recently strayed into issues of sex/gender relations and power. I am not an anarchist but I do like how he explains matters in an organized and clear way.

In this video he goes through the different, opposite, mismatched or even antagonistic preferences and advantages of males and females in courtship. I find his set-up clear and helpful. The list of things he managed to think of rings true with what I have seen in male-female interactions up till now.

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Do you find his comparisons list accurate? If not, what could be added or discarded to make it accurate?

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

I don't agree. He is utilizing rather unsupported claims. I went and had a look and he seems to be responding to criticisms that show the evidence is rather weak.

For instance, I'll point out the issue of men wanting to "spread their seed." This is a psychological/physical confusion. Men have a psychological desire for sex just as women do, it might be claimed. It's the result of physical desires influencing things.

Gay promiscuity is real? If it is, why is it genetic and wouldn't it be somehow mathematically comparable to promiscuity in heterosexual couples x2 or something? And it's not related to procreation directly which is the evolutionary reason sex drive is encouraged.

Then men will have sex with strangers when approached. They might also eat ice cream if asked. You can create wants or provide options that make a person say "hey, that's nice." Doesn't mean they were actively interested in pursuing it or even that they wanted it. Ice cream person is dieting, let's say, or is polite and doesn't actually like ice cream.

Then sex drive increasing in presence of more mates. This is just an evolutionary mechanism and doesn't suggest that all men want more partners. People are incredibly prone to misinterpreting the relationship between sexuality and psychology. For instance, everyone is all "biological imperative to procreate." If that were as true as they claim, we wouldn't see the society we do today where people actively choose not to have kids, have operates, use birth control, etc. All while no noted psychological problems arise.

Too much stereotyping. Women don't necessarily want the best seed. Psychology is powerful. For instance, if I learn that men may favor women with large hips because it's good for birthing children, I'll be like alright then "note to self." Start appreciating all women because I don't want kids anyway.

[Queercommie Girl]

Social darwinist reductionism. So where do LGBT people such as gays, transgendered people and genderqueer people fit into this theoretical framework? I guess anyone who does not fit into this neat social-darwinist gender role must be "unfit to survive"?

So what if I'm a man who tends to act like a woman? Do I not deserve exactly the same kind of right as a man "who acts like a man"?

This is going back to right-wing bourgeois gender stereotypes.

Anarchists really need to study some Marxist theory. Humans are not animals, we are not just quantitatively higher, but also qualitatively higher. We don't simply adapt to the environment and our biological instincts, we can fundamentally transform them. In the future people might be able to change from fully genetic male to fully genetic female and back at will, and the whole two-gender paradigm would completely become obsolete.

Sex is not at the centre of human evolution. All this excessive focus on sexual evolution by mainstream contemporary evolutionary psychologists is quite reactionary. It is not good to see socialists joining into their camp. As Engels said, what is at the centre of human evolution is material production based on brain-hand co-ordination.

Just because a theory seems to make sense doesn't mean that it actually does. True scientists would tell you that much of what we consider as "common sense" is actually fundamentally wrong. Common sense would tell us that the sun revolves around the earth, which is precisely the opposite to the reality. Mechanistic application of Darwinian ideals to human psychology and society is un-dialectical and reactionary. Socialists of the 19th century already debunked much of social darwinism. It is sad to see self-claimed socialists of the 21st century going back to it now.

Social darwinism is what led to racism, Nazism and other fascist ideologies. I say let everyone be who they really are when it come to sexuality and to the hell with this mechanistic two-gender paradigm.

[Queercommie Girl]

Scientific knowledge primarily comes from observation and experimentation, not abstract theory. Abstract ideas of sexual psychology based on social darwinism etc are largely meaningless.

[al8]

Social darwinist reductionism. So where do LGBT people such as gays, transgendered people and genderqueer people fit into this theoretical framework? I guess anyone who does not fit into this neat social-darwinist gender role must be "unfit to survive"?

No, I would think just less likely to bear offspring. Gays and lesbians seem to survive just fine. The intimate bonding of a pontent man and a fertile female lends itself more directly to producing offspring. Those kinds of people are lovedrunk with romantic notions, blind to each others flaws to aid them in producing offspring that they then form strong and long-lasting attachements to. The long maturation of younglings of our species makes this strategy make perfect sense. Those that don't have MoP to produce children have to go for extra hazzle like adoption, artificial incemination, use bymothers and such. But I haven't noticed him commiting any reductionism. His larger theory seem pretty dynamic to me. He is just limiting his subject matter to the time he has.



So what if I'm a man who tends to act like a woman? Do I not deserve exactly the same kind of right as a man "who acts like a man"?

As I understand it, this has never anything to do about rights. One puts people off or on in courship by how one behaves, looks, ones social position and reaps benefits or no in accordance with that.



This is going back to right-wing bourgeois gender stereotypes.

Anarchists really need to study some Marxist theory. Humans are not animals, we are not just quantitatively higher, but also qualitatively higher. We don't simply adapt to the environment and our biological instincts, we can fundamentally transform them. In the future people might be able to change from fully genetic male to fully genetic female and back at will, and the whole two-gender paradigm would completely become obsolete.

The two-gender system may well become obsolete, but this is not here yet. So we have to ground us in how things our now. So how does this two-gender system work now, and what are the advatages of each sex in the courtship process?

And of course humans are tool users and not so bound by not having wings, fangs or claws - to a significantly higer degree than other animals such as chimps, crows and elephants - but in return we are bound by the mode of production. You might say that the mode of production is our biology wich produce our wings (airplanes), teeth (knives) etc. Just as tall termite structures are a product of the termite supra-organism.


Sex is not at the centre of human evolution. All this excessive focus on sexual evolution by mainstream contemporary evolutionary psychologists is quite reactionary. It is not good to see socialists joining into their camp. As Engels said, what is at the centre of human evolution is material production based on brain-hand co-ordination.

I agree with you. But I don't see how focusing on one thing is necessarily discarding the other. How does understanding of the production process tie into a useful understanding of courtship dynamics?


Just because a theory seems to make sense doesn't mean that it actually does. True scientists would tell you that much of what we consider as "common sense" is actually fundamentally wrong. Common sense would tell us that the sun revolves around the earth, which is precisely the opposite to the reality. Mechanistic application of Darwinian ideals to human psychology and society is un-dialectical and reactionary. Socialists of the 19th century already debunked much of social darwinism. It is sad to see self-claimed socialists of the 21st century going back to it now.

Social darwinism is what led to racism, Nazism and other fascist ideologies. I say let everyone be who they really are when it come to sexuality and to the hell with this mechanistic two-gender paradigm.

I don't see a reason why most people would turn gay or gender-ambiguous when capitalist relation have been superseded by communist ones. There is nothing mechanistic about gender relations between men and women. From what I have gathered it's fairly complex and dynamic.

[Queercommie Girl]

No, I would think just less likely to bear offspring. Gays and lesbians seem to survive just fine. The intimate bonding of a pontent man and a fertile female lends itself more directly to producing offspring. Those kinds of people are lovedrunk with romantic notions, blind to each others flaws to aid them in producing offspring that they then form strong and long-lasting attachements to. The long maturation of younglings of our species makes this strategy make perfect sense. Those that don't have MoP to produce children have to go for extra hazzle like adoption, artificial incemination, use bymothers and such. But I haven't noticed him commiting any reductionism. His larger theory seem pretty dynamic to me. He is just limiting his subject matter to the time he has.


The chance of bearing offspring is mostly influenced by economic factors, not direct biological ones.



As I understand it, this has never anything to do about rights. One puts people off or on in courship by how one behaves, looks, ones social position and reaps benefits or no in accordance with that.


Actually it has everything to do with rights. Communism believes that every single person should be equal and there should be no distinct ranks in "social position".

Or are you suggesting that communists and socialists should not fight for people's rights?



The two-gender system may well become obsolete, but this is not here yet. So we have to ground us in how things our now. So how does this two-gender system work now, and what are the advatages of each sex in the courtship process?


I have no great interest in exploring this question within an evolutionary psychological framework. Evolutionary psychology is largely bourgeois science, which plays a reactionary role to a significant extent, and this kind of useless idle speculation has no positive role to play within the socialist movement at large.



I agree with you. But I don't see how focusing on one thing is necessarily discarding the other. How does understanding of the production process tie into a useful understanding of courtship dynamics?


The whole point is that there is no such thing as a single dogmatic "normative" courtship dynamics, since humans are not animals qualitatively and cannot be analysed as animals like social darwinists do.



I don't see a reason why most people would turn gay or gender-ambiguous when capitalist relation have been superseded by communist ones. There is nothing mechanistic about gender relations between men and women. From what I have gathered it's fairly complex and dynamic.


Hetero-normative gender relations that exclude queer relations are indeed mechanistic.

Significant differentiation between gender is a product of class society. It is reactionary to apologise for such a differentiation.

[Queercommie Girl]

No, I would think just less likely to bear offspring. Gays and lesbians seem to survive just fine. The intimate bonding of a pontent man and a fertile female lends itself more directly to producing offspring. Those kinds of people are lovedrunk with romantic notions, blind to each others flaws to aid them in producing offspring that they then form strong and long-lasting attachements to. The long maturation of younglings of our species makes this strategy make perfect sense. Those that don't have MoP to produce children have to go for extra hazzle like adoption, artificial incemination, use bymothers and such. But I haven't noticed him commiting any reductionism. His larger theory seem pretty dynamic to me. He is just limiting his subject matter to the time he has.
Your narrow-mindedness comes from the fact that you look at the "family" in a bourgeois manner, made up of a man and a woman and their biological children.

To think that this is the only way or the most correct way of having a human family is ridiculous.

If you go outside the small nuclear family paradigm, there is no reason why, even according to your narrow social-darwinist reductionist logic, that gays and lesbians cannot produce as many offspring or even more so than straight people.

In a communist society the nuclear family structure is smashed up. Children are brought up collectively, often not primarily by their birth parents. There is no reason to think that children have to have their birth parents as primary carers, frequently professional child-carers can provide a better quality.

According to your narrow standard many gay men for instance are actually very "fit", they just happen to not be sexually attracted to women, or in the case of bi-sexuals, are attracted to both men and women. But this does not stop them from mating with equally "fit" lesbians who are not romantically attracted to men. There is no reason to think that reproduction has to involve direct romance or courtship. Such is only true within a certain family structure, when the entire family structure is transformed, the logic breaks down.

[Meridian]

Even if a couple of the points presented are quite legitimate, it is impossible to discuss or take too seriously because it is all based on ungrounded speculation.

However, to do some pointless speculation myself; I think that social abilities are quite vital, and that the power of so-called "social intelligence" (being outgoing and charismatic) is very important. However, women who are lacking in this department can get by on looks (whereas women who has neither looks nor social abilities are stereotypically deemed less attractive). For men, lacking social abilities is generally critical and deemed unattractive. Given their supposed position as the outgoing "chaser", f.ex. anxiety is an unattractive trait and I would reckon appearances comes in second order of importance after that.

[Queercommie Girl]

Even if a couple of the points presented are quite legitimate, it is impossible to discuss or take too seriously because it is all based on ungrounded speculation.

However, to do some pointless speculation myself; I think that social abilities are quite vital, and that the power of so-called "social intelligence" (being outgoing and charismatic) is very important. However, women who are lacking in this department can get by on looks (whereas women who has neither looks nor social abilities are stereotypically deemed less attractive). For men, lacking social abilities is generally critical and deemed unattractive. Given their supposed position as the outgoing "chaser", f.ex. anxiety is an unattractive trait and I would reckon appearances comes in second order of importance after that.

Indeed, much of evolutionary psychology is idle speculation, rather than based on empirical evidence.

I recommend the book "The Myth of Mars and Venus" to challenge some of this kind of ideas.

It is funny to see self-proclaimed revolutionaries following the same kind of gender logic as the right-wing conservative bourgeois authors of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus". I guess people are right to suggest that currently the socialist movement is at a relatively low point globally.

Some people today are even less progressive than Marxist scholars more than a hundred years ago, who explicitly challenged the logic of social darwinism.

[Queercommie Girl]

No, I would think just less likely to bear offspring. Gays and lesbians seem to survive just fine.

I see you only mentioned "gays and lesbians" but left out transgendered people. Could you please explain your choice of words here?

[manic expression]

anxiety is an unattractive trait and I would reckon appearances comes in second order of importance after that.
Personally, I think it's funny how women call men superficial, but then they so often reject some poor dude just because he showed hesitation or nervousness or anxiety...:laugh: hilarious, really. Courtship is one of the few things in modern society in which women have a hell of a lot of power, and look how they end up using it.

[Queercommie Girl]

The two-gender system may well become obsolete, but this is not here yet. So we have to ground us in how things our now. So how does this two-gender system work now, and what are the advatages of each sex in the courtship process?

And of course humans are tool users and not so bound by not having wings, fangs or claws - to a significantly higer degree than other animals such as chimps, crows and elephants - but in return we are bound by the mode of production. You might say that the mode of production is our biology wich produce our wings (airplanes), teeth (knives) etc. Just as tall termite structures are a product of the termite supra-organism.


It's not just a matter of quantitative degree, but a matter of qualitative change. To use an analogy, it's not the difference between water at 90 degrees and water at 10 degrees. It is the difference between water at 99 degrees and steam at 101 degrees. It is a change of state.

Humans are sentient and have self-awareness, animals do not. As Lenin put it: the structures made by bees can on the surface put human engineers to shame. But even the most evolved bees are still nothing compared with the most crude of human engineers, in that before the human engineer constructs anything, he/she already has a model of the object in his/her mind.

[9]

god damn, that was a boring video!
Those earrings are pretty tight, though.

[black magick hustla]

i predict this thread is going to turn horrible

[Queercommie Girl]

i predict this thread is going to turn horrible

I do not wish to get personal at all, but I feel every socialist must challenge "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"-type reactionary ideas.

[JohnnyC]

No offense to people that agree with him, but I think he's full of shit.What he says is maybe true for some people, but obviously there are many others out there that don't fit his hypothesis.Of course this is because gender is a social construct and individual personalities and preferences are not predetermined by your sex.

[al8]

It's not just a matter of quantitative degree, but a matter of qualitative change. To use an analogy, it's not the difference between water at 90 degrees and water at 10 degrees. It is the difference between water at 99 degrees and steam at 101 degrees. It is a change of state.

Humans are sentient and have self-awareness, animals do not. As Lenin put it: the structures made by bees can on the surface put human engineers to shame. But even the most evolved bees are still nothing compared with the most crude of human engineers, in that before the human engineer constructs anything, he/she already has a model of the object in his/her mind.

Qualitative difference? I don't think its that spectacular. Our control and planing of habitat is so low and disjointed by the profit-motive. There is no encompassing planing of the human habitat. Our cultural erections are a fractured mess (as in urban sprawl). Engineers and active thinking are all the same rare, and even in those cases the actors involved are atomized and have their own specialized work field and are bound by the whole - like termites. A lot of animals must model objects and tasks in their meat calculator just as any other dead missile. And chimps have self-awareness - that is, they recognize themselves in the mirror. And chimps are animals.

[al8]

I see you only mentioned "gays and lesbians" but left out transgendered people. Could you please explain your choice of words here?

Brevity. The discussion is about Male-Female gender relations in courtship. Mentioning every sexual preference and every shade of gender, post-gender, trans-gender or whatever have you in every sentence can be cumbersome.

And as well I don't see how token recognition of gender whatevers shed light on male-female courtship protocols. And Iseul if male-female courtship is so mechanistic - that is, simple and straight forward - then why can't you spell out what its about at present?
It doesn't matter if it is just a social construct because they are none the more un-real for it. Racism is simply a social structure, but that dosn't mean that racial norms aren't clear, obvious and well felt.

[leftace53]

I think this dude's explanation is incomplete rather than simply inaccurate. He's definitely playing with some unfounded claims, and generalizing a lot. However I don't think that he is completely inaccurate in mates trying to choose "the best seeds" for procurement of the "best" combination of genes for an offspring.

The courtship process though, is riddled with gender relations I don't much care for.

[Queercommie Girl]

Qualitative difference? I don't think its that spectacular. Our control and planing of habitat is so low and disjointed by the profit-motive. There is no encompassing planing of the human habitat. Our cultural erections are a fractured mess (as in urban sprawl). Engineers and active thinking are all the same rare, and even in those cases the actors involved are atomized and have their own specialized work field and are bound by the whole - like termites. A lot of animals must model objects and tasks in their meat calculator just as any other dead missile. And chimps have self-awareness - that is, they recognize themselves in the mirror. And chimps are animals.

Since you reject the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism, obviously you won't see the difference between quantitative and qualitative change.

An organism/civilisation's power and productivity can be measured by how much energy it can use every second, or its wattage. (An idea first developed by the ex-Soviet astrophysicist Kardashev) Now take a dozen or so animal species plus humanity and plot power against genetic distance. You find that between chimps and humans although the genetic distance is quite small, there is a huge jump in power. In fact, the power output of the human species is several orders of magnitude higher than that of the chimp. On the other hand, the power output of the chimp species isn't so much higher than that of the carrot, despite an immense genetic distance.

This demonstrates that once genetic evolution reaches a certain threshold level, the organism's outward capacity for power generation, which is at the heart of productivity that in turn determines the productive relation and all higher cultural structures, "quantum leaps" so-to-speak. It is a graphical demonstration of the dialectical principle of quantitative and qualitative change. You could plot a similar graph for water turning into steam: e.g. average molecular separation against temperature, there is a huge leap at 100 degrees C.

[Queercommie Girl]

Look at this archaeological evidence (as I said, science is more observation than theory) from neolithic ancient communism. It suggests that there were no significant differences in terms of lifestyle and social expression among men and women at the time. So how does your theory explain this observation?

Significant differentiation between gender is a product of class society. It is reactionary to apologise for such a differentiation.

http://www.urkommunismus.de/catalhueyuek_en.html

Truly outstanding and especially remarkable is the fact that women, too, received tools as burial objects, just as men did (Mellaart 1967: 209) (Footnote:This seems to have held true for neolithic civilizations in general, even for Central European linear pottery culture (linearbandkeramik) (Nordholz 2004: 124). However, this interrelation rarely seems to be observed. 6). In later class societies, men (of the "middle classes") received burial objects that allowed conclusions as to their profession but women's graves contained only jewellery: rich women were given rich jewellery, poor women poor jewellery. That these women worked just as hard - if not even harder - than men is not reflected in the burial objects. The tools in neolithic women graves illustrate that women were recognized as equals as a matter of course in the production of goods. This, in turn, supports the assumption that in this society the antagonism between production and reproduction was abolished. There are mural paintings in ?atalh?yük that complement and confirm this assumption; they show men dancing with children (Mellaart 1966: pl. LIV, LV, LIX, LXI), a motif that does not occur in class society until the 13th century B.C. and also later only led a shadowy existence. Also, in contrast to Mellaart's statement, not only women were buried with children but men also (Hamilton 1996: 253/1).

However, not only were women buried with tools but also men were buried with jewellery, partially with considerable amounts (Hamilton 1996: 262) (Fussnote:Mellaart's converse argument stems from the fact that he frequently determined the sex of the skeletons according to their grave goods (!). It was only after Angel's anatomical examinations of the skeletons six years after that the true facts were revealed (Hamilton 1996: 245/2, 258/2). 7). Naomi Hamilton who in Hodder's team is responsible for working with the graves and therefore for analyzing gender relations, doubts if the definition of a social gender apart from biological sex is at all helpful in the discussion on ?atalh?yük. She regards the concept of gender as bound to our times and their problems and considers the possibility that neolithic humans did not perceive man and woman as being a polarity (Hamilton 1996: 262). Indeed, already in 1990 Hodder developed the thought that the decisive polarity for neolithic perception may have been of a different nature (Hodder 1990). It is interesting that more recent considerations lead to an analogous assumption concerning the Palaeolithic (Heidefrau 2004). The author, Elke Heidefrau, writes: "Possibly, the discussion on gender ... mainly reveals something about our own culture: a culture in which it seems immensely important to know sex of another person (see the first question asked after the birth of a child). To us, a culture in which this is not the case seems almost unthinkable; therefore, such thoughts could open new horizons to us and thus enrich the current gender discussion!" (Heidefrau 2004: 148; translated). Obviously, at that time the real individuals were at the centre, and when they liked to adorn themselves their jewellery was not taken away from them when they died - regardless of their sex. And it was people who produced, possessed and used tools and therefore also kept them in their graves - again, regardless of their sex.