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Are Men
Monogamous?
Two scientists suggest
that monogamy is biologically determined - and that human males have an innate
predisposition toward monogamy.
This seems ridiculous -
given the evidence.
It is far more likely
that, for example, 'fear of aggression' is determined biologically, and that
monogamy is simply a good CULTURAL way of reducing aggression within a society.
In
Relationships Men Want Sex, And Women Security
by Robert
Uhlig In
The
Daily Telegraph
At the heart of all
long-term relationships lies a fundamental deception, scientists say today.
Women stay with men for security, and men remain with women for sex.
This doesn't quite tally
with the notion that men are sexually clapped-out by the age of 45, does it? - the common misandric complaint in the feminist press.
If men were clapped out, then,
presumably, according to these scientists, they
wouldn't require their 'long-term relationships' to be maintained, would they?
After all, if men are mainly interested in remaining in long-term
relationships with women for sex, then what is the point of men remaining
with women once the sex has gone?
Furthermore, the evidence
would seem to suggest that, while men remain fairly sexually desirous throughout
most of their lives, even into old age, it does not take long before men get
rather tired of being with the same partner, sexually speaking.
men almost certainly do NOT remain in long-term
relationships primarily for sex.
In other words, men almost certainly do NOT remain in long-term relationships
primarily for sex. If anything, their sex drive is likely to make them 'play the
field' in order to derive satisfaction from different female conquests. Long
term relationships are not very conducive to this.
Researchers in Holland
and Sweden say in New Scientist that the deception is the driving force behind
the evolution of monogamy. By offering sex all the time, they say, females in
monogamous species, such as humans, birds and porcupines, disguise whether they
are fertile and trick males into staying.
The implied notion here is
that young men are inclined, if not desperate, to reproduce
offspring - which is ridiculous.
Orgasm? Yes.
Offspring? No Comment.
The result is that men
haplessly ['haplessly'?
- men are hopeless aren't they?]
become monogamous, unable to move on to a new partner because they cannot
determine whether their most recent coupling has resulted in pregnancy. [There
is no sense or logic to this. Firstly, do men actually care? Secondly, he'll
find out if she's pregnant soon enough!]
Although it intuitively makes sense [no
it doesn't]
scientists had no explanation why men were mainly monogamous [This
is almost unbelievable twaddle. Are men mainly monogamous as a direct
consequence of their biology, or does culture force
them to be so?]
whereas males in most species seek to mate with as many females as possible to
maximise the number of children they father.
Usually, a male choosing
a stable relationship over a philandering lifestyle would have fewer offspring,
putting him at an evolutionary disadvantage. [EXACTLY!]
Now, Magnus Enquist, a zoologist at Stockholm University, and Miguel Girones of
the Netherlands Institute of Ecology have made a mathematical model proving that
under certain conditions monogamy makes more sense than sleeping around.
Prof Enquist said that in
most species, females only had sex when they were fertile because it took energy
and risked disease. "The male strategy is to stay with the female for as
long as she is fertile, then leave." This meant that males could easily
tell which females were fertile to avoid wasting time on mates that would not
conceive.
Males usually gave
females no help in raising their offspring. But humans, birds and porcupines
were more sophisticated, Prof Enquist said, because the females did not use
visual or chemical clues to indicate when they were fertile. Instead, women had
sex at any time to prevent men from telling when they might be fertile.
This explanation sounds too far-fetched.
The most likely reason that women had sex at
any time is that, quite simply, if they had not been readily receptive at all
times to male advances then their potential suitors would have immediately
galloped off elsewhere to find more welcoming female territory.
In other words, females were designed to be
permanently willing!
In other words, females were designed to be
permanently willing!
LOL!
Once males were blind to
a female's condition it was no longer worth their while chasing lots of
partners, because the one they were with was as likely to be fertile as any
other.
This sounds like baloney.
And politically-correct baloney at that - apart from the female 'trickery'
bit.
And, if my memory serves
me correctly, it is only in the past few thousand years - at most - that men and
women have actually become aware that sex might lead to babies.
Evolutionarily speaking, males
today are mostly the offspring of the most highly sexual males. And the females
of today descend from the ones most able to look after their
children successfully.
The females, of course, would also have benefited
considerably by
successfully manipulating males to look after them and their children. And so
one can surmise that today's women are
the offspring of the best manipulators in town!
(As if we didn't know.)
And, of course, if monogamy was truly an innately-predisposed biological
'imperative' for human survival, then societies would hardly need fairly
draconian cultural laws such as those relating to marriage - and commitment.
Homo Sapiens would simply fall into 'marriage' - like some of those monogamous
birds.
And if men were innately
monogamous, societies would also not have so many problems caused by those
seemingly insatiable sex drives that make many men do the stupidest - and often most
criminal - of things.
Our genes have certainly
not changed much in the past 50,000 years, and much of our brain is pretty 'old'
- millions of years old - in the evolutionary sense. We share very much with
chimpanzees. And the evidence seems to suggest that Homo Sapiens started to 'civilise'
into large co-operative groups, of 50 or more, only some 20,000 years ago.
The trick to 'success',
and growth, in ALL these different groups, was 'patriarchy' - a cultural
phenomenon where, among other things, rules were
laid down that made the men the heads of their families.
And the groups that did
this, and made other successful cultural 'deals', grew in power - until Homo
Sapiens eventually took over the planet.
And it is well worth noting that those groups that were not patriarchal
DIDN'T 'MAKE IT'.
NOT ONE
OF THEM!
No patriarchy, no success.
Males are not monogamous
biologically. And it would NOT have been evolutionarily advantageous for
them to be so.
Males are not monogamous biologically. And it would not have been
evolutionarily advantageous for them to be so. After generations of 'hominids'
(2 million years of them perhaps) the 'monogamous gene' would have been
statistically washed away by the genes for philanderers and rapists.
In recent times, however,
(20,000 years - where evolution can have had little impact in this area) men
have been forced to be monogamous by many societies that wanted to be strong and that
needed to maintain certain beliefs (often religious) in order to protect that strength.
In the future, however, humans
will probably arrange matters so that many more females than males are born.
In the future, however, humans
will probably arrange matters so that many more females than males are born.
And then we will surely see how truly monogamous are men. LOL! |