Photo by Flickr user KC-Bike. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Holly, who's been quietly been posting a very readable series on rape culture, beautifully summarizes the no-sex class underpinnings of the transactional-sex model of heterosexuality. The third paragraph is pretty chilling. I've emphasized the key sentence.

The "Consent as Contract" Model.

I believe that consent consists of wanting to have sex or do another activity. In practical terms, when you're with a non-telepath, consent requires expressing that desire, but the expression still isn't the important part; the desire is.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't seem to see consent this way. Instead, it's a binding contract: generally in exchange for something, a woman commits her pussy as payment. She isn't really expected to enjoy the sex; she's expected to tolerate it, and enjoy the dinner or jewelry or hugs or however the fuck this is supposed to work. Therefore, a woman in a situation that seems to be leading up to sex who then refuses to have sex is in breach of contract (and frankly being a little unreasonable), and letting her off the hook is an act of grudging generosity on the man's part. And a woman having sex without making the consent contract is being ripped off, but not really violated, because pussy is just a tool women wield dispassionately anyway.

This mindset doesn't just justify and trivialize rape; it also makes for some really shitty consensual sex, based on the "you're not supposed to like this part, you're supposed to like the dinner and this part is for me" mindset. Which ultimately doesn't even work out that great for guys, because "here, fine, have my pussy, you've earned it" isn't exactly a recipe for brutally passionate lovemaking.

Source: The Pervocracy

That last part just crisply summarizes how we can live in rape culture even though most men would never consider committing criminal sexual assault style rape.

Call it the intolerable clause in bogus Rule #1: In the transactional model of heterosexuality it just wouldn't feel fair for the women to enjoy both the dinner/movie/diamond/flowers/whatever and the sex.

But, as Holly says, sex with someone who's only grudgingly holding up her end of "the bargain" isn't exactly going to be something to write home about.  And is likely to be attractive only to someone who's mired to the eyeballs in bogus Rule #2.

Bingo!  Reviewing a book called The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands by Dr. Laura Schlessinger,  Winterbuzz hits the nail on the head about Schlessinger reflexive and constant feminist bashing in the book (emphasis mine)

Let the record show that I, a feminist, have never condemned a man based on his gender. Her title alone suggests that males are “stupid” or at the very least on par with a barnyard animal.

Source: Feminist Mormon Housewives

That's just about as on target as it gets: when people ask me why I'm so comfortable with feminism, or why other men should be into feminism, it's because nobody hates men like anti-feminists hate us, nobody fears men as much as anti-feminists fear us, and nobody wants to regulate or control men as completely as anti-feminists want to regulate or control us.

And nobody, not even Twisty Faster, has more contempt for men than anti-feminists like "Doctor" Laura Schessinger has contempt for us!  As Winterbuzz pithily snarks of one tidbit of "advice" for wives.

"Thank him for bringing home his paycheck and not spending it on gambling or booze or drugs or women."

(Since you’re a man, naturally gambling, booze, drugs and women are the only things you’d like to spend your hard-earned cash on.)

Or check out this Schlessinger snippet of man-hatred Winterbuzz digs up.

[M]en are simple creatures who come from a woman, are nurtured and brought up by a woman, and yearn for the continued love, admiration and approval of a woman. . . Women need to better appreciate the magnitude of their power and influence over men, and not misuse or abuse it.

To which she replies

I am soooo tired of men being described as sex-crazed animals who can barely control their urges. I’m raising boys and this offends me. My husband, brother, father and children are more than lusty lions.

I’m not trying to get off subject, but I think this idea is so pervasive in our church, it’s needs addressing...

Does that mean there's nothing to criticize about men?  No.  But Winterbuzz makes the strongly feminist case that men are as subject to the system of Patriarchy as women.  And, also with strongly feminist sensibilities, she makes the case that the way out is not more of the anti-feminism Schlessinger and her male and female allies long for.  (Again, emphasis mine.)

Reducing men to sex-crazed animals who can’t control themselves absolves them from responsibility and self control. And while boys might lust after girls, society has proven that no matter what we do to curb this, it still happens.  It’s nature friends! The perpetuation of the species kinda depends on it. But that’s an argument for another day, the bottom line is girls should not be taught that their bodies are tools for the whims of men. Girls are objectified everyday in many, many way, and using religion to perpetuate those attitudes is called spiritual violence. Our church (and this book) objectifies women as domestic objects. And while our church might not mean to do it, it contributes to an attitude that continues to claim that men are weak, over-sexed animals and women are responsible to counteract that.

Got that last bit?  Anti-feminists don't resent feminists for putting men down.  They resent that feminists are refusing to sacrifice themselves to keep men down.  The complete failure to recognize this near mirror-image of reality is the source of almost all misunderstanding of the relationship of feminism to men. Because unlike women like Schlessinger feminists want to be men's peers, not our subordinates and certainly not our minders, mothers, wranglers, or butlers.  And straight feminists (and almost all feminists are) want partners they can respect in the morning.

When your entire expectation is, as Schlessinger approvingly quotes a caller as saying, "Men are only interested in two things: If I’m not horny, make me a sandwich," there's no, zero, none room for respect.

I'll take feminists any day, thank you.

Sooo....

If I was a pop evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist I might spend all my time pondering how it's just seed-spreadingly natural for men to want to be polygamous.

Oh, silly, me.  Actually if I was a pop evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist I wouldn't ponder any such thing.  I'd take it as axiomatic -- requiring no proof beyond "makes sense to me" -- and cheerfully use that axiom to prove anything else that popped into my little brain. When pressed by people with a modicum of gender-studies in their background I'd blithly breeze by way of explanation that hogamous-higamous, men are polygamous.

The other axiom I'd posit would be that women just don't like sex in the first place, and that therefore they're grudgingly going to aim to have it as infrequently as possible, preferably with as few men as possible.  And explain that with higamous-hogamous, women are monogamous.  Oh, and bitches too.  Oh, or if they didn't match my axiom, whores.

In evolutionary biology, on the other hand, it's more common to actually ponder whether there might be a reproductive benefit or cost underlying any inclination towards something like monogamy.

Something like this tidbit, via from Holly of Self-Portrait as, who says --

...low fertility rates among Mormon polygamists. My favorite bit:

the more women partnered with a man, the fewer children each of those women had. Exactly why is not clear. Like the Soay rams, men may simply not have had the stamina.... The failure of the Utah polygamy experiment should therefore not be seen as that surprising.

Source: Self-Portrait as

Reading the article it sounds like, in fact, on average, women in polygamous marriages tend to have approximately one fewer child for every fellow "sister wife."  And no, that's not a stretch.  Stories of sultans or Mormon patriarchs notwithstanding, most polygamists have somewhere closer to two to four wives, meaning a one-child per fellow wife isn't going to put anyone in negative numbers.

Anyway, EPs and sociobiologists tend to go on, and on, and on, about how men can fertilize bazillions of women in a lifetime while women's "investment" of pregnancy, lactation, and staying home in the cave-kitchen limits their reproductive potential to a relative handful.  And they brass on about how that means men are "naturally" likely to collect wives and partners willy-nilly whereas women are going to just as "naturally" be all gate-keeper-y and discriminating.

Which never made much sense to me -- in the real, non-Flintstones version of "the state of nature" related groups of women with satellite groups of men seems pretty common, and those groups of related women are usually able to collectively gather and trap enough to feed themselves and most of the men.  So while women might tend to care about fathers, and be interested in having men in their lives, and definitely interested in the meat and other foodstuffs men tend to hunt and forage for.  So in pure reproductive survival terms that's never seemed like a good enough reason to "evolve" a preference for monogamy.

If I were to going to assume that women are "naturally" monogamous, though, and if I were further inclined to go looking for facile sociobiological explanations for why that might be, then the likelihood that getting rooked into polygamy creates a material reduction in women's reproductive potential ought to be just about all I'd need to start making that case.

---

Getting back to the original article, the reference to Soay rams is about a variety of sheep that do the whole alpha male head-butting fights over harems thing... but basically run out of sperm.  In comments someone pointed out the tendency for women to ovulate in sync.  That would tend to put a pretty heavy limit on men's ability to productively "spread his seed" in his own "harem."

Which in turn leads me back to the suspicion that "collecting" wives is probably a relatively recent function of property accumulation rather than some sort of "on the savannah" biological adaptation.

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Note that whereas women (and females of other species) are evidently reproductively harmed by polygamy, there wouldn't necessarily be the same issues with polyamory, either overt or covert.  So whereas men might be concerned about "cuckoldry," women (in polygamous marriages anyway) would positively benefit from it.  But in monogamy?  Not so much -- which at the very least ought to be a monogamy selectivity-stabilizer for men. (Don't hold your breath waiting for a pop sociobiologist to bring that one up.)

"Unwilling Goddess" wrote Em & Lo asking for advice on the following problem.

Dear Em & Lo,

How does one gracefully say “Thanks, but no thanks”? It seems to happen a lot to me: I treat the guy like a friend — meaning I don’t make innuendo (no puns please!) nor banter, etc., I just converse fercrissake! — and a few weeks (or months, or hours) later he’s dropping heavy hints and gazing at me with That Look. I then try to avoid any situations that may lead him on; i.e. refusing a drink together, though I wouldn’t mind having a friendly one. Also, I don’t want to lose friends who suddenly want to move it a notch further than I really want. Any ways to let them down gently?

– Unwilling Goddess

Source:

I don't really have a lot of advice for dealing with this. But I can look at the question from a couple of different perspectives.

It sounds as if the correspondent would find it more convenient if men didn’t grow more romantically attracted to women as they get to know them better, spend more time around them, and just generally appreciate all their qualities, and not just be turned on by the superficialities of their faces, hair, or booties. In actuality, though, a lot of men have exactly those romantic qualities that are more often attributed to stereotypes of women.

And looking at the question from yet another angle, surely the correspondent isn’t suggesting that women base their attractions to partners on initial hormonal response and thus never become more attracted to them as they got to know them better. If so then that would suggest that women have qualities that are more often attributed to stereotypes of men.

My intuition has always been that the following lyrics could be sung as easily by women as by the men (Rogers and Hammerstien*) who wrote them for the Anna character in The King and I:

Getting to know you,
Getting to feel free and easy
When I am with you,
Getting to know what to say

Haven’t you noticed
Suddenly I’m bright and breezy?
Because of all the beautiful and new
Things I’m learning about you
Day by day.

Actually my intuition says that’s still true. Chime in if I’m wrong, though.

* Not actually being a huge fan of musicals I wasn't aware until I Googled it that the song was from The King and I or that it was sung by women and not as a duet between a man and woman. (I'd guessed it was instead from West Side Story.)