From: zatavu-AT-excite.com Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 18:19:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: God Bless Us, Mr Rosewater SOme interesting comments, though the feminist reading of the male penis is a bit off kilter, I would say. For the purporses of rape? Everything comes down to rape for some feminists, until rape becomes meaningless. Though equating it to the antlers on deer is closer, I think, to the truth. It was a sexual adaptation to an upright stance. The same with women's breasts, which have more than a fleeting resemblance to the buttocks - which our other primate relatives are known to find seuxally exciting. The penis works in the same way. Longer, and you intimidate other males (as we know still happens), and you also attract females. Now, as to how useful this sort of information is, I can give you anecdotal evidence as to how useful I have found it to be. An example: men release a pheromone that women find repulsive, except preceeding and during ovulation, when the pheromone becomes undetectable by women. So women quite literally find men repulsive (the radical feminists should be saying now: see, we told you so!) except during a certain time of the month. Women are most sensitive to this during their periods. Knowing this, I realize that there will be times when my girlfriend will have a hard time being around me, because she will be more sensitive to this pheromone I am giving off. Previous to this knowledge, I did not understand why my previous girlfriend would be affectionate sometimes andact as though she were repulsed. Between that girlfriend and this one, I have learned about the pheromones. Now I understand and do not get upset when she acts like she doesn't want to be around me. I realize she cannot help the way she is acting - it is a biological response and has nothing to do with her feelings otherwise. Of course, now she can't understand why I'm always nice to her, even when she's "being mean" to me, as she puts it, but since i know why she is acting the way she is, how can I hold it against her, since she can't help it? Thus, I am in the best relationship I have ever been in. We don't fight over trivialities, which means we essentially don't fight (fuss occassionally, but we have never been in a real fight or argument). SInce I understand why she acts in certain ways (the issue with the pheromones, and other hormone/pheromone/biological differences) that are different from me (because I'm a male and she's a female - which is not to say that the way I act is any better or worse, just different), we are more able to get along. Which makes me happier and makes my life better overall. That's how this kind of information can help you in life. Troy Camplin > Extremely interesting points. But sexual selection too is a Darwinian premise. It is a show of strength - not to the predator, but to the mate...Like, why do male testicles hang outside the body? The brain has the skull, the heart and lungs have the ribcage; but the testes make us `an armoured tank driven by a driver in a balloon on the roof.' Richard Dawkins negates the temperature argument - the management of heat for sperm production, since sperm cannot survive for long at body temperature - and contends that chances are that we could easily have evolved a different body temperature that was appropriate to the process. He digs out maverick Israeli naturalist Aaron Zahavi's 1975 `vulnerability argument,' that advertisement is very important and than an ad is only believed if its is validated by being costly. "Look how powerful a male I am because I can afford to wear my balls outside my body. You'd better not mess with me because I'm proving my strength and my ability as a f! > ighter." > > Likewise with a seven inch dick. Why is it so long> Feminist Susan Brownmiller argues that a long penis is required in a society that routinely rapes women (remember, we are talking caveman here - our culture of the past 5000 years is a microsecond in evolutionary terms). She contends that man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear was one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times. Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear - an act carried out by a few men on behalf of many, a male protection racket. A man could argue, a woman needed to be protected (by him) from every other man, and thereby monopolise her reproduction, thus conferring evolutionary benefits on himself. In modern times, this view finds support in widespread incidents of confinement, domestic violence, ritualised clitoridectomies in which even the labia minora are excised, and the middle c! > lass male's `keep her barefoot and pregnant' philosophy of exercising male control! > > A possible solution to the riddle lies in understanding male aggression, firmly rooted in the behavioral patterns of primates in general, not just for survival benefits but also for the pursuit of females. Male gorillas have evolved to twice the size of female gorillas, and in their world brute strength alone wins the fair maiden. Humans, on the other hand, aren't quite so aggressive, and statistics show that the incidence of murder and infanticide among primates is several hundred times the homicide rate in even Los Angeles! > > Man's capacity for peaceful cooperation with his fellows, while not quite Utopian yet, combined with the extreme dependency of the young, have ensured the need for a strong family bond. The development of the stable pair bond that solved a number of problems at one stroke: the females remained faithful to men while they were away on the hunt; serious sexual rivalries between males were reduced. One hypothesis therefore is that the aggressive brutality of the males of other primates is sublimated in the human male by a show of domination via penile length (gorillas don't require such an adaptation because they live in harems, not communes). The wastefully long penis could well be a peaceful mnemonic (along with another testosterone manifestation - muscle mass) for one man's sexual dominance over the other, just like the gaudiest feathers give a profound sexual edge to the parading peacock? Zoologists do recognise that most sexual ornaments (for eg, deer antlers) serve the dual ! > function of attracting mates and establishing dominance over same-sex rivals. Isn't that why penis envy is not so rampant among women as it is among men? > > To a large extent, these common sense explanations - even though they are often wrong - alone can provide a basis for deconstructing our motives. Nz did the same in his brilliant deconstruction of the ego. My question is does it help understanding ourselves this way? Does sugar taste any less sweet once we know that sweet's just a taste we developed to choose the ripest, most calorie-laden papayas? Does Nz's brilliant psychology, by providing us insights into our own actions, actually make us better people? Does evolutionary theory actually provide us with the possibility of a workable ethic? I think not. Courage, grace and authenticity, I have observed, come about in their own subterranean ways, not via insight and definitely not via pedantic or "logical" interpretations of what Nietzsche meant. _______________________________________________________ Say Bye to Slow Internet! http://www.home.com/xinbox/signup.html --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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