Footnote: Reactionary Effects of Dividing The Genders

Feminism

This seems to me to be such a reaction. Its aim is equality in indivi­dual rights irrespective of gender. It is, of course, a laudable end­ea­vour. It also seeks to protect women from things like dom­estic vio­lence, sexual harassment and assault. However, I think that all hu­man beings should equally have protection from these dangers. Language — certainly English — has a masculine bias. For example when a pronoun pertains to what is of either mixed or un­specified gender, the masculine default is used. I once proposed a new word "che" as a gender-neutral replacement for "he" or "she". But I doubt that such a thing will ever be implemented.

I cannot disagree with equal voting rights, equal rights in employment, equal ability to make contracts and own property. In her old role as a home-maker, a woman oc­cupied, created and managed her own home. She had liberty, control and respons­ibility. In fervently seeking these rights, she seems to be seeking to become like a man: a corporate wage-slave, a mindless cog, in a Draconian and dysfunctional ec­onomic system.

The fact that the initiative for gender-equality is called "Feminism" is itself gender-biased and is therefore divisive.

Homosexuality

What appears to me to be another reaction against culturally-induced gender dichotomy is homosexuality. Throughout hist­ory people appear to have had homosexual relationships. Gen­er­ally, however, these were each subordinate to a normal mar­riage or to a dominant heterosexual relationship. Entering into a relationship that is exclusively homosexual seems to be a rel­atively modern phenomenon.

People often cite research that shows homosexuality to be ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. From this they deduce that homosexuality must be natural for humans. Perhaps so, but such a deduction has to be qualified.

The reason animals engage in homosexual activity is not really known. Experts offer various theories. It may be a means of defusing tension between competing males in order to maintain social cohesion. Perhaps it is for this reason also that the males of some species at times mimic femininity. Or it could be a ploy to divert a com­peting male's attention away from scarce females. With young or adolescent ani­mals it may simply be a form of pre-run or practice to prepare them for hetero­sexual mating when they fully mature. Perhaps these reasons are also valid for hu­mans to some extent.

Notwithstanding, it appears that for the most part, an animal engages in a same-gender sex act only when it does not have access to a partner of the opposite gen­der. Access could be denied by a shortage within the population or simply by the separation of distance. This could also be the case with humans. In humans, how­ever, denial of access is more strongly imposed by a cultural barrier deliberately erected by vested interests within society. [1]

There is an established ethos within many human societies that males should be aggressive and adversarial while females should be reconciliatory and submissive. I believe that these are highly exacerbated manifestations of the natural differences between male and female dispositions. They are infused into the national culture by the State to prepare men with the mentality to kill on its behalf when necessary in order to further the ambitions of its elite.

Consequently, if a particular man is by nature inclusive and conciliatory, he has 3 options. 1) He can consciously modify his behaviour to conform to the mascu­line norm of his society, 2) he can be himself and be regarded by society as odd, 3) he can over-react and exaggerate his inclusive and conciliatory self, becoming what is often derogatorily described as camp. And society almost universally equates being camp with being homosexual. Social pressures even convince the camp person himself that he is naturally homosexual, thereby inducing him to become so.

Isolated during adolescence in a boys-only school with no sisters of similar age within his family. Moved from city to city, school to school, neighbourhood to neigh­bourhood in his father's on-going quest to keep in work. These situations of modern society deprive a young man of the social skills necessary to relate with a woman. The last girls he saw were children in infants school. They are long gone and scatt­ered in far-flung parts of the country or the world.

The only female forms he sees around him are encapsulated in commercially con­structed cultural casings of current fashion, each successfully obfuscating the hu­manity within it. They don't appear as people but as strangely adorned objects of art. They behave and interact according to the protocols of an alien feminine sub-culture, carefully shaped and honed to promote the consumption of feminine brand products.

He necessarily encounters and interacts with these female automata in the work­place, government agencies, shops and places of leisure. He can therefore relate formally (though somewhat awkwardly) with them as colleagues, officials, clients or service-providers. Such relationships are necessary but are nonetheless extremely shallow. They are far too narrow to satisfy the human need to connect, to love and to trust. They are not channels of sufficient emotional and intellectual bandwidth to facilitate the sharing of hopes, dreams, interests, values and aspirations.

This lack of bandwidth becomes a barrier to communication with the opposite gen­der, which translates into a socially-induced [anxious-avoidant] personality disorder that exclusively relates to the opposite gender. He experiences persistent and per­vasive feelings of tension and apprehension at the prospect of relating em­otionally with a woman. He comes to believe that, in her eyes, he will be socially inept, per­son­ally unappealing, or inferior to other men. He is constantly overly-fearful of be­ing criticized, disap­proved of or rejected by her. He is therefore very reluctant to attempt to become involved with her.

Consequently, the only part of society with which he is equipped to relate com­fort­ably is that part comprising his fellow men. Unfortunately, the majority of these naturally prefer to relate most strongly with members of the opposite gender. He must therefore find some means of identifying himself to that small minority of his fellow men who are by nature inclusive and conciliatory like he is.

He therefore adds a histrionic dimension to his personality. He adopts a more flam­boyant style of dress. He interacts with people in a more theatrical way. He ac­cent­uates his inclusive and conciliatory nature through spontaneous receptive­ness. He reacts to others by dramatizing his appreciation, excitement, hurt or dis­appoint­ment. He thereby finds and relates with other men who also have not had their natural emotions warped by a State-engineered national culture of macho men and coy women. He becomes part of a somewhat isolated sub-set of society called the gay community.

But being of a gay disposition does not mean that he is naturally attracted to en­gage in buggery. It is society that equates a camp disposition with homosexuality. Were they emotionally accessible to him, he would much rather have a deep per­sonal relationship with a woman.

This is evinced by how well many gay men get on with female colleagues, both at work and socially. I have heard women comment that they enjoy the company of gay colleagues because they treat them as people and not as sex objects the way straight men do. But why do straight men treat women like sex objects rather than as female people? Because they have allowed themselves to be conditioned by the prevailing culture, which expects and requires them to do so. Gay men and women are simply those who reject and react against this State-engineered cultural cond­itioning.

Promiscuity

Many ancient Celtic and Anglo-Saxon societies were not monogamistic. Individuals shared available natural resources to turn their labour into their needs of life. The relationships that linked individuals formed a tribal intimate network. This structure still exists in some remote aboriginal tribes. Some anthropologists provide cogent arguments as to why the intimate network could be a natural and beneficial struc­ture for human society [2].

In contrast, the ancient Roman law of Famulus imposed strict monogamy upon all. It was essentially a law about the possession and inheritance of land, goods, ani­mals and people. The people a man possessed (his family) comprised his one wife, his children and his slaves. When he died, everything passed to his eldest son. Inti­mate interaction between families was thereby prohibited. Only male heads of families were members of Roman society. This made Roman society easy to control and hence to tax.

From Roman times, the Christian church added a moral dimension to this structure. It imposed, through religious fear, strict sexual mono­gamy. This inhibited the formation of intimate networks at the grass roots level within society. It thereby alleviated the most dangerous threat to the Roman hierarchy. Despite an intervening age of en­light­enment, State-enforced social monogamy and church-enforced sex­ual monogamy have remained indelibly etched into Western cul­ture.

With the advent of universal education, religion started gradually to lose its grip. In­stead of blindly accepting what they had been taught, some started to think for themselves. People questioned the rationality of the constraints that had been im­posed upon them. They began to react against these constraints.

On the surface, Western society still maintains its conservative appearance. Social mon­ogamy, as an economic and legal construct, is preserved. Below the surface, how­ever, sexual monogamy is rapidly eroding. Both pre-marital and inter-marital liai­sons are crystallising rapidly throughout society. This is evinced by objective studies of adolescent relationship networks [3] and data from genetic paternity tests show the extent to which illicit intimate inter-marital friendships must now exist within the adult population [4].

These liaisons are nonetheless mostly temporary. Relationships among adolescents are invariably short-term. And a spouse generally terminates one affair before be­ginning another. Consequently, such links only exist singularly and serially. They do not have the time and freedom to develop to the strength, depth and diversity needed to form a stable intimate network as found in aboriginal tribes.

Finding themselves free of the chains of divine fear, many are over-reacting. Swing­ers are an example. Swingers are usually married couples who join a club or go to parties where they each freely engage in sexual intercourse with members of other couples. They do not seem to employ this physical intimacy as a conduit for build­ing intellectual, emotional and spiritual relationships with friends of similar know­ledge, interests, values and aspirations. For this reason, swinging strikes me as a very shallow and futile form of relating.

Another example is the hotwife phenomenon. A hotwife is a married woman who has sexual relationships with men other than her husband. In this she has her husband's full accept­ance and approval. Her husband may or may not engage in sexual relationships with other women.

From what I can glean, it appears that a hotwife's extra-marital relationships are again, for the most part, nothing more than raw physical sex. However, this does not have to be so. She could be what I understand to be termed a polyamorist.

Polyamory embraces a variety of possible relational structures but it can perhaps be best illustrated by the arrangement I refer to as con­servative polyamory. Here, the male half of a couple may have several secondary "wives" while the female half may have several secondary "husbands". Each relationship may or may not involve physical sex. Nevertheless, it is an emotional relationship that essentially involves shared interests, val­ues, aspirations and projects. But most importantly, it is a relationship of love. Love here refers not to the selfish love of ex­clusive possession. In­stead it is the deep, selfless all-inclusive love of friendship, more specif­ic­ally of inter-gender friendship.

This is probably the most noble and effective attempt to construct a grass-roots in­timate network within modern Western society. The Internet is even now sprouting tools that can be used to facilitate its growth. Those involved are, however, faced with two enormous problems: one external and one internal. Firstly, they are ham­pered by a political, religious and cultural establishment that is continually working against them. Secondly, the human spirit has not yet evolved to the stage of truly being able to accommodate the deep, selfless all-inclusive love of friendship. Even the most spiritually evolved of people have not yet become masters of the dest­ruct­ive emotions of lust, desire, jealousy, exclusive possession and domination that still necessarily lurk within the human mind. So even the most robust of amorous links are still blighted with an unwelcome brittleness.

All this suggests that monogamy is not a component of the natural attractor that should determine the form and function of human society. Quite the contrary, monogamy is a culturally-enforced imposition that severely stresses and distorts its natural structure and operation.

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Parent Document © March 2011, Robert John Morton

[1] see "Same-sex sexual behavior and evolution" by Nathan W. Bailey and Marlene Zuk, Department of Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA

[2] see The Virtues of Promiscuity by Sally Lehrman July 22, 2002 (AlterNet)

[3] see Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School by James Moody, professor of sociology at Ohio State University, USA

[4] see Mommy's Little Secret The [Canadian] Globe and Mail, By CAROLYN ABRAHAM, Saturday, December 14, 2002 – Print Edition, Page F1
Also see: The Web of Human Sexual Contacts by Fredrik Liljeros*, Christofer R. Edling*, Luís A. Nunes Amaral†, H. Eugene Stanley†, Yvonne Åberg*
*Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
†Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA