Sex or Gender

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

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"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

With same-sex marriage becoming a legal reality throughout the world, many more children are going to be raised by homosexual (gay and lesbian) parents, or even by transgendered or transsexual ones. How is this going to affect the child’s masculinity or femininity?

Is being a gay man less manly than being a heterosexual one? Is a woman who is the outcome of a sex change operation less feminine than her natural-born sisters? In which sense is a “virile” lesbian less of a man than an effeminate heterosexual or homosexual man? And how should we classify and treat bisexuals and asexuals?

What about modern she-breadwinners? All those feminist women in traditional male positions who are as sexually aggressive as men and prone to the same varieties of misconduct (e.g., cheating on their spouses)? Are they less womanly? And are their stay-at-home-dad partners not men enough? How are sex preferences related to gender differentiation? And if one’s sex and genitalia can be chosen and altered at will – why not one’s gender, regardless of one’s natural equipment? Can we decouple gender roles from sexual functions and endowments?

Aren’t the feminist-liberal-emancipated woman and her responsive, transformed male partner as moulded by specific social norms and narratives as their more traditional and conservative counterparts? And when men adapted to the demands of the “new”, post-modernist woman – were they not then rebuffed by that very same female as emasculated and unmanly? What is the source of this gender chaos? Why do people act “modern” while, at heart, they still hark back to erstwhile mores and ethos?

We assume erroneously that some roles are instinctual because, in nature, other species do it, too: parenting and mating come to mind. The discipline of sociobiology encourages us to counterfactually learn from animals about our social functioning.

But humans and their societies are so much more complex that there is little we can evince from lobsters, chimpanzees, or gorillas.

In nature, there is "male" and "female", not "man" and "woman" which are learned and acquired gender roles. There is no "mother" and "father", even among apes - just progenitors.

To fulfill any of these demanding and multifarious human functions, we must be exposed to good enough and working role models in childhood and then practice tirelessly through adulthood, constantly reframing and evolving as demands and expectations change with social mores and the times. Evolution in the human species is no longer predominantly genetic - but social and cultural.

So, many people simply don't know how to act as men or as women, as mothers or as fathers. Here, faking it never makes it.

In nature, male and female are distinct. She-elephants are gregarious, he-elephants solitary. Male zebra finches are loquacious - the females mute. Female green spoon worms are 200,000 times larger than their male mates. These striking differences are biological - yet they lead to differentiation in social roles and skill acquisition.

Alan Pease, author of a book titled "Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps", believes that women are spatially-challenged compared to men. The British firm, Admiral Insurance, conducted a study of half a million claims. They found that "women were almost twice as likely as men to have a collision in a car park, 23 percent more likely to hit a stationary car, and 15 percent more likely to reverse into another vehicle" (Reuters).

Yet gender "differences" are often the outcomes of bad scholarship. Consider Admiral Insurance’s data. As Britain's Automobile Association (AA) correctly pointed out - women drivers tend to make more short journeys around towns and shopping centers and these involve frequent parking. Hence their ubiquity in certain kinds of claims. Regarding women's alleged spatial deficiency, in Britain, girls have been outperforming boys in scholastic aptitude tests - including geometry and maths - since 1988.

In an Op-Ed published by the New York Times on January 23, 2005, Olivia Judson cited this example

"Beliefs that men are intrinsically better at this or that have repeatedly led to discrimination and prejudice, and then they've been proved to be nonsense. Women were thought not to be world-class musicians. But when American symphony orchestras introduced blind auditions in the 1970's - the musician plays behind a screen so that his or her gender is invisible to those listening - the number of women offered jobs in professional orchestras increased. Similarly, in science, studies of the ways that grant applications are evaluated have shown that women are more likely to get financing when those reading the applications do not know the sex of the applicant."

On the other wing of the divide, Anthony Clare, a British psychiatrist and author of "On Men" wrote:

"At the beginning of the 21st century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in serious trouble. Throughout the world, developed and developing, antisocial behavior is essentially male. Violence, sexual abuse of children, illicit drug use, alcohol misuse, gambling, all are overwhelmingly male activities. The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, delinquent behavior, risk taking and social mayhem, men win gold."

Men also mature later, die earlier, are more susceptible to infections and most types of cancer, are more likely to be dyslexic, to suffer from a host of mental health disorders, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and to commit suicide.

In her book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man", Susan Faludi describes a crisis of masculinity following the breakdown of manhood models and work and family structures in the last five decades. In the film "Boys don't Cry", a teenage girl binds her breasts and acts the male in a caricatured relish of stereotypes of virility. Being a man is merely a state of mind, the movie implies.

But what does it really mean to be a "male" or a "female"? Are gender identity and sexual preferences genetically determined? Can they be reduced to one's sex? Or are they amalgams of biological, social, and psychological factors in constant interaction? Are they immutable lifelong features or dynamically evolving frames of self-reference?

In rural northern Albania, until recently, in families with no male heir, women could choose to forego sex and childbearing, alter their external appearance and "become" men and the patriarchs of their clans, with all the attendant rights and obligations.

In the aforementioned New York Times Op-Ed, Olivia Judson opines:

"Many sex differences are not, therefore, the result of his having one gene while she has another. Rather, they are attributable to the way particular genes behave when they find themselves in him instead of her. The magnificent difference between male and female green spoon worms, for example, has nothing to do with their having different genes: each green spoon worm larva could go either way. Which sex it becomes depends on whether it meets a female during its first three weeks of life. If it meets a female, it becomes male and prepares to regurgitate; if it doesn't, it becomes female and settles into a crack on the sea floor."

Yet, certain traits attributed to one's sex are surely better accounted for by the demands of one's environment, by cultural factors, the process of socialization, gender roles, and what George Devereux called "ethnopsychiatry" in "Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry" (University of Chicago Press, 1980). He suggested to divide the unconscious into the id (the part that was always instinctual and unconscious) and the "ethnic unconscious" (repressed material that was once conscious).  The latter is mostly molded by prevailing cultural mores and includes all our defense mechanisms and most of the superego.

So, how can we tell whether our sexual role is mostly in our blood or in our brains?

The scrutiny of borderline cases of human sexuality - notably the transgendered or intersexed - can yield clues as to the distribution and relative weights of biological, social, and psychological determinants of gender identity formation.

The results of a study conducted by Uwe Hartmann, Hinnerk Becker, and Claudia Rueffer-Hesse in 1997 and titled "Self and Gender: Narcissistic Pathology and Personality Factors in Gender Dysphoric Patients", published in the "International Journal of Transgenderism", "indicate significant psychopathological aspects and narcissistic dysregulation in a substantial proportion of patients." Are these "psychopathological aspects" merely reactions to underlying physiological realities and changes? Could social ostracism and labeling have induced them in the "patients"?

The authors conclude:

"The cumulative evidence of our study ... is consistent with the view that gender dysphoria is a disorder of the sense of self as has been proposed by Beitel (1985) or Pfäfflin (1993). The central problem in our patients is about identity and the self in general and the transsexual wish seems to be an attempt at reassuring and stabilizing the self-coherence which in turn can lead to a further destabilization if the self is already too fragile. In this view the body is instrumentalized to create a sense of identity and the splitting symbolized in the hiatus between the rejected body-self and other parts of the self is more between good and bad objects than between masculine and feminine."

Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, and Fliess suggested that we are all bisexual to a certain degree. As early as 1910, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld argued, in Berlin, that absolute genders are "abstractions, invented extremes". The consensus today is that one's sexuality is, mostly, a psychological construct which reflects gender role orientation.

Joanne Meyerowitz, a professor of history at Indiana University and the editor of The Journal of American History observes, in her recently published tome, "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States", that the very meaning of masculinity and femininity is in constant flux.

Transgender activists, says Meyerowitz, insist that gender and sexuality represent "distinct analytical categories". The New York Times wrote in its review of the book: "Some male-to-female transsexuals have sex with men and call themselves homosexuals. Some female-to-male transsexuals have sex with women and call themselves lesbians. Some transsexuals call themselves asexual."

So, it is all in the mind, you see.

This would be taking it too far. A large body of scientific evidence points to the genetic and biological underpinnings of sexual behavior and preferences.

The German science magazine, "Geo", reported recently that the males of the fruit fly "drosophila melanogaster" switched from heterosexuality to homosexuality as the temperature in the lab was increased from 19 to 30 degrees Celsius. They reverted to chasing females as it was lowered.

The brain structures of homosexual sheep are different to those of straight sheep, a study conducted recently by the Oregon Health & Science University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Sheep Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho, revealed. Similar differences were found between gay men and straight ones in 1995 in Holland and elsewhere. The preoptic area of the hypothalamus was larger in heterosexual men than in both homosexual men and straight women.

According an article, titled "When Sexual Development Goes Awry", by Suzanne Miller, published in the September 2000 issue of the "World and I", various medical conditions give rise to sexual ambiguity. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), involving excessive androgen production by the adrenal cortex, results in mixed genitalia. A person with the complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) has a vagina, external female genitalia and functioning, androgen-producing, testes - but no uterus or fallopian tubes.

People with the rare 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome are born with ambiguous genitalia. They appear at first to be girls. At puberty, such a person develops testicles and his clitoris swells and becomes a penis. Hermaphrodites possess both ovaries and testicles (both, in most cases, rather undeveloped). Sometimes the ovaries and testicles are combined into a chimera called ovotestis.

Most of these individuals have the chromosomal composition of a woman together with traces of the Y, male, chromosome. All hermaphrodites have a sizable penis, though rarely generate sperm. Some hermaphrodites develop breasts during puberty and menstruate. Very few even get pregnant and give birth.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental geneticist, professor of medical science at Brown University, and author of "Sexing the Body", postulated, in 1993, a continuum of 5 sexes to supplant the current dimorphism: males, merms (male pseudohermaphrodites), herms (true hermaphrodites), ferms (female pseudohermaphrodites), and females.

Intersexuality (hermpahroditism) is a natural human state. We are all conceived with the potential to develop into either sex. The embryonic developmental default is female. A series of triggers during the first weeks of pregnancy places the fetus on the path to maleness.

In rare cases, some women have a male's genetic makeup (XY chromosomes) and vice versa. But, in the vast majority of cases, one of the sexes is clearly selected. Relics of the stifled sex remain, though. Women have the clitoris as a kind of symbolic penis. Men have breasts (mammary glands) and nipples.

The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition describes the formation of ovaries and testes thus:

"In the young embryo a pair of gonads develop that are indifferent or neutral, showing no indication whether they are destined to develop into testes or ovaries. There are also two different duct systems, one of which can develop into the female system of oviducts and related apparatus and the other into the male sperm duct system. As development of the embryo proceeds, either the male or the female reproductive tissue differentiates in the originally neutral gonad of the mammal."

Yet, sexual preferences, genitalia and even secondary sex characteristics, such as facial and pubic hair are first order phenomena. Can genetics and biology account for male and female behavior patterns and social interactions ("gender identity")? Can the multi-tiered complexity and richness of human masculinity and femininity arise from simpler, deterministic, building blocks?

Sociobiologists would have us think so.

For instance: the fact that we are mammals is astonishingly often overlooked. Most mammalian families are composed of mother and offspring. Males are peripatetic absentees. Arguably, high rates of divorce and birth out of wedlock coupled with rising promiscuity merely reinstate this natural "default mode", observes Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. That three quarters of all divorces are initiated by women tends to support this view.

Furthermore, gender identity is determined during gestation, claim some scholars.

Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii and Dr. Keith Sigmundson, a practicing psychiatrist, studied the much-celebrated John/Joan case. An accidentally castrated normal male was surgically modified to look female, and raised as a girl but to no avail. He reverted to being a male at puberty.

His gender identity seems to have been inborn (assuming he was not subjected to conflicting cues from his human environment). The case is extensively described in John Colapinto's tome "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl".

HealthScoutNews cited a study published in the November 2002 issue of "Child Development". The researchers, from City University of London, found that the level of maternal testosterone during pregnancy affects the behavior of neonatal girls and renders it more masculine. "High testosterone" girls "enjoy activities typically considered male behavior, like playing with trucks or guns". Boys' behavior remains unaltered, according to the study.

Yet, other scholars, like John Money, insist that newborns are a "blank slate" as far as their gender identity is concerned. This is also the prevailing view. Gender and sex-role identities, we are taught, are fully formed in a process of socialization which ends by the third year of life. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition sums it up thus:

"Like an individual's concept of his or her sex role, gender identity develops by means of parental example, social reinforcement, and language. Parents teach sex-appropriate behavior to their children from an early age, and this behavior is reinforced as the child grows older and enters a wider social world. As the child acquires language, he also learns very early the distinction between "he" and "she" and understands which pertains to him- or herself."

So, which is it - nature or nurture? There is no disputing the fact that our sexual physiology and, in all probability, our sexual preferences are determined in the womb. Men and women are different - physiologically and, as a result, also psychologically.

Society, through its agents - foremost amongst which are family, peers, and teachers - represses or encourages these genetic propensities. It does so by propagating "gender roles" - gender-specific lists of alleged traits, permissible behavior patterns, and prescriptive morals and norms. Our "gender identity" or "sex role" is shorthand for the way we make use of our natural genotypic-phenotypic endowments in conformity with social-cultural "gender roles".

Inevitably as the composition and bias of these lists change, so does the meaning of being "male" or "female". Gender roles are constantly redefined by tectonic shifts in the definition and functioning of basic social units, such as the nuclear family and the workplace. The cross-fertilization of gender-related cultural memes renders "masculinity" and "femininity" fluid concepts.

One's sex equals one's bodily equipment, an objective, finite, and, usually, immutable inventory. But our endowments can be put to many uses, in different cognitive and affective contexts, and subject to varying exegetic frameworks. As opposed to "sex" - "gender" is, therefore, a socio-cultural narrative. Both heterosexual and homosexual men ejaculate. Both straight and lesbian women climax. What distinguishes them from each other are subjective introjects of socio-cultural conventions, not objective, immutable "facts".

In "The New Gender Wars", published in the November/December 2000 issue of "Psychology Today", Sarah Blustain sums up the "bio-social" model proposed by Mice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and a former student of his, Wendy Wood, now a professor at the Texas A&M University:

"Like (the evolutionary psychologists), Eagly and Wood reject social constructionist notions that all gender differences are created by culture. But to the question of where they come from, they answer differently: not our genes but our roles in society. This narrative focuses on how societies respond to the basic biological differences - men's strength and women's reproductive capabilities - and how they encourage men and women to follow certain patterns.

'If you're spending a lot of time nursing your kid', explains Wood, 'then you don't have the opportunity to devote large amounts of time to developing specialized skills and engaging tasks outside of the home'. And, adds Eagly, 'if women are charged with caring for infants, what happens is that women are more nurturing. Societies have to make the adult system work [so] socialization of girls is arranged to give them experience in nurturing'.

According to this interpretation, as the environment changes, so will the range and texture of gender differences. At a time in Western countries when female reproduction is extremely low, nursing is totally optional, childcare alternatives are many, and mechanization lessens the importance of male size and strength, women are no longer restricted as much by their smaller size and by child-bearing. That means, argue Eagly and Wood, that role structures for men and women will change and, not surprisingly, the way we socialize people in these new roles will change too. (Indeed, says Wood, 'sex differences seem to be reduced in societies where men and women have similar status,' she says. If you're looking to live in more gender-neutral environment, try Scandinavia.)"

Film Review: "What to Expect When You Are Expecting" (2012)

Modern pop culture bombards us with gender stereotypes, which by now have become truisms: women are always sensitive, misunderstood, in touch with their emotions and neglected; men are commitment-phobic, confused, narcissistic, hypersexed, and hell-bent on frustrating the opposite number.

It was, therefore, refreshing to watch the four female protagonists of the film "What to Expect When You Are Expecting" reduce these caricatures to smithereens. The womenfolk in the film are self-centered, dread intimacy and commitment, two of them are workaholics, and all four are rank narcissists.

The men in this otherwise middling movie are romantic, in touch with their emotions, committed, and largely selfless. The only exception is the dysfunctional father of one of them, a throwback to the 1960s when men were still machos and sex meant everything. His youthful wife makes up for his shortcomings, though: she is clear-headed, no-nonsense, determined, sharp-witted, and a strict disciplinarian when needed. But this incongruous couple is the only exception to an otherwise coherent message: men have matured, women should get their act together.

The women are the ones who - not so secretly - abhor the thought of what bearing children would do to their bodies and to their lives (in this order.) The men encourage them to be fruitful and multiply as the ultimate fad in self-fulfillment and self-gratification.

Another striking feature of this film is the fact that none of the women, despite being all over the place, feels the need to seek advice. They live alone and cope in solitude: gone are the tips-dispensing mother; the supportive female soulmate; The effeminate or gay male friend; the recurring old flame; the motherly colleague or avuncular co-worker. It's every woman for herself now. And they are botching the job, says the film, as thoroughly as men ever did.

The Death of Traditional Sex in a Unisex World

Traditional sex – the heady cocktail of lust and emotional bonding - is all but dead. In a culture of casual, almost anonymous hookups, suppressing attendant emerging emotions is the bon ton and women and men drift apart, zerovalent atoms in an ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic world, separated by a yawning expectations gap, their virtual isolation aided and abetted by technologies, collectively misnomered “social media“.

It is increasingly more difficult to both find a mate and keep him or her. One fifth of all American couples are sexless. In Japan, about half of all adolescents are schizoid and prefer technological gadgets to flesh-and-blood peers. A quarter of all males in Britain would rather watch the telly or bar crawl with their friends than garner carnal pleasure. People everywhere increasingly rely on Internet porn and auto-erotic stimulation to relieve themselves. Sex has become the sordid equivalent of other excretory bodily functions, best pursued in solitude.

At the root of this upheaval is the ill-thought and violent subversion of received gender roles. Women sought to become not only equal to men, but identical to them. Rather than encourage a peaceful evolution, they embarked on a series of shattering and disorienting gender wars with men as the demonized enemy. Attempting assertiveness, women found aggression.

Relationships have become virulent battlefields and the zero testing grounds of a brave, new world. No wonder men find women bafflingly masculine and unattractive. They recoil from commitment and bonding because the rules of engagement are fuzzy, the resources required depleting, the rewards scanty, and the risks – pecuniary and emotional – devastating. Birth rates have plunged well below the replacement rate in most industrialized societies: childrearing requires stable arrangements with reasonable prognoses of functional health and longevity.

In short: the typical, chauvinistic male still wants to get married to his grandmother and his narcissistic female counterparty wishes to live happily ever after with a penile reflection of herself. The differences in expectations lead to discrepancies in performance which are all but unbridgeable and irreconcilable. Breakup rates are unprecedented in human history. The lucrative business of divorce is no longer frowned upon and is facilitated by lenient legislation and a veritable cornucopia of institutions. The proliferation of models of pairing and cohabitation is proof positive that the system is broken: it’s every man for himself now. Society is even more clueless and impotent than the individuals it is ostensibly comprised of and, therefore, can provide no normative guidance.

People react to this massive rupture in various ways: some abstain from or renounce sex altogether; a few experiment with bi- or homosexuality; others immerse themselves in cybersex in its multifarious forms; many choose one night stands and random encounters rendered riskless by contraceptives and made widely available via modern transportation and telecommunication. Opportunities for all the above abound and, socially well-tolerated, recreational, non-committal, and emotionless sex is on the rise.

But the roots of the crumbling alliance between men and women go deeper and further in time. Long before divorce became a social norm, men and women grew into two disparate, incompatible, and warring subspecies. Traditionalist, conservative, and religious societies put in place behavioural safeguards against the inevitable wrenching torsion that monogamy entailed: no premarital sex (virginity); no multiple intimate partners; no cohabitation prior to tying the knot; no mobility, or equal rights for women; no mixing of the genders. We now know that each of these habits does, indeed, increase the chances for an ultimate divorce. As Jonathan Franzen elucidates in his literary masterpieces, it boils down to a choice between personal freedoms and the stability of the family: the former decisively preclude the latter.

Consider the very language we use to describe one of the most common interactions between the two genders.

To describe sex with a woman as "penetration" is counterfactual: no barrier is breached (except when the hymen is broken in virgins). Up until recently, most women were virgins when they got married, hence the widely used misnomer. To properly describe the act, one should use words like "insertion" and "engulfment" or "reception".

Penetration is of course the male's aggressive POV and aggressive: the amorous equivalent of laying siege to the woman.

But nowadays women are as assertive and dominant as men (if not more so). They often initiate the sex, aggressively when needs must. This is also reflected in the non-traditional positions that many women assume during sex and in the expanding use of toys and aides.

Sex is totally reciprocal in most cases and the woman's needs and predilections are fully catered to. As a minimum, the parties equally use each others's bodies to climax.

Still, there are objective differences:

Men are invited in: women maintain the exclusive function of gatekeeping. Men are guest, women hosts, anatomically speaking. It is the apex of corporeal intimacy to allow someone into your body.

Men deposit sperm (gametes) in the woman while women only contribute lubrication.

Male latency with same woman is way longer - but not with a different woman! So, psychosexually, man do regard women as "single use" partners and their physiology reflects it. On porn websites, this frame of mind is abundant and women are irredeemably objectified.

Women also secrete bonding and attachment hormones (such as oxytocin) way more than men do and men release copious amounts of conquering aggression hormones, such as testosterone.

There is no such thing as meaningless sex, however cursory and casual. But we have learned to deceive ourselves that such insignificant liaisons do exist. We are paying the ultimate price now, as a species: the complete breakdown in communication between men and women; gender vertigo and wars, fueled by misogyny and misandry; and a unigender world where women increasingly and vociferously emulate psychopathic men and men are lost like never before oscillating between toxic masculinity and effeminate self-negation.

During the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, discreet affairs were an institution of marriage: sexual gratification and emotional intimacy were outsourced while all other domestic functions were shared in partnership. The Industrial Revolution, the Victorian Age, the backlash of the sexual revolution, belligerent feminism, and the advent of socially-atomizing and gender-equalizing transportation, information processing, and telecommunication technologies led inexorably to the hollowing out of family and hearth.

 

In a civilization centred on brainpower, Men have lost the relative edge that brawn used to provide. Monogamy is increasingly considered as past its expiry date: a historical aberration that reflects the economic and political realities of bygone eras. Moreover: the incidence of lifelong, childfree (or childless) singlehood has skyrocketed as people hope for their potential or actual relationship-partners to provide for all their sexual, emotional, social, and economic needs – and then get sorely disappointed when they fail to meet these highly unrealistic expectations.

 

In an age of economic self-sufficiency, electronic entertainment, and self-gratification, the art of compromise in relationships is gone. Single motherhood (sometimes via IVF, with no identifiable partner involved) has become the norm in many countries. Even within marriages or committed relationships, solitary pursuits, such as separate vacations, or “girls’/boy’ nights out” have become the norm.

 

The 20^th century was a monument to male fatuity: wars and ideologies almost decimated the species. Forced to acquire masculine skills and fill men’s shoes in factories and fields, women discovered militant self-autonomy, the superfluousness of men, and the untenability of the male claims to superiority over them.

 

In an age of malignant individualism, bordering on narcissism, men and women alike put themselves, their fantasies, and their needs first, all else – family included – be damned. And with 5 decades of uninterrupted prosperity, birth control, and feminism/ women’s lib most of the female denizens of the West have acquired the financial wherewithal to realize their dreams at the expense and to the detriment of collectives they ostensibly belong to (such as the nuclear family.) Feminism is a movement focused on negatives (obliterating women’s age-old bondage) but it offers few constructive ideas regarding women’s new roles. By casting men as the enemy, it also failed to educate them and convert them into useful allies.

 

Owing to the dramatic doubling of life expectancy, modern marriages seem to go through three phases: infatuation (honeymoon); procreation-accumulation (of assets, children, and shared experiences); and exhaustion-outsourcing (bonding with new emotional and sexual partners for rejuvenation or the fulfilment of long-repressed fantasies, needs, and wishes.) Divorces and breakups occur mostly at the seams, the periods of transition between these phases and especially between the stages of accumulation-procreation and exhaustion-outsourcing. This is where family units break down.

 

With marriage on the decline and infidelity on the rise, the reasonable solution would be swinging (swapping sexual partners) or polyamory (households with multiple partners of both genders all of whom are committed to one another for the long haul, romantically-involved, sexually-shared, and economically united.) Alas, while a perfectly rational development of the traditional marriage and one that is best-suited to modernity, it is an emotionally unstable setup, what with romantic jealousy ineluctably rearing its ugly head. Very few people are emotionally capable of sharing their life-partner with others.

 

The question is not why there are so many divorces, but why so few. Surely, serial monogamy is far better, fairer, and more humane than adultery? Couples stay together and tolerate straying owing to inertia; financial or emotional dependence; insecurity (lack of self-confidence or low self-esteem); fear of the unknown and the tedium of dating. Some couples persevere owing to religious conviction of for the sake of appearances. Yet others make a smooth transition to an alternative lifestyle (polyamory, swinging, or consensual adultery).

Indeed, what has changed is not the incidence of adultery, even among women. There are good grounds to assume that it has remained the same throughout human history. The phenomenon - quantitatively and qualitatively - has always been the same, merely underreported. What have changed are the social acceptability of extramarital sex both before and during marriage and the ease of obtaining divorce. People discuss adultery openly where before it was a taboo topic.

 

Another new development may be the rise of “selfish affairs” among women younger than 35 who are used to multiple sexual partners. “Selfish affairs” are acts of recreational adultery whose sole purpose is to satisfy sexual curiosity and the need for romantic diversity. The emotional component in these usually short-term affairs (one-night stands and the like) is muted. Among women older than 60, adultery has become the accepted way of seeking emotional connection and intimacy outside the marital bond. These are “outsourcing affairs.”

 

The ancient institution of monogamous marriage is ill-suited to the exigencies of modern Western civilization. People of both genders live and work longer (which renders monogamy impracticable); travel far and away frequently; and are exposed to tempting romantic alternatives via social networking and in various workplace and social settings.

 

Thus, even as social monogamy and pair commitment and bonding are still largely intact and more condoned than ever and even as infidelity is fervently condemned, sexual exclusivity (mislabelled “sexual monogamy”) is declining, especially among the young and the old. Monogamy is becoming one alternative among many lifestyles and marriage only one relationship among a few (sometimes, not even a privileged or unique relationship, as it competes for time and resources with work, same-sex friends, friends with benefits, and opposite-sex friends.)

 

The contractual aspects of marriage are more pronounced than ever with everything on the table: from extramarital sex (allowed or not) to pre-nuptial agreements. The commodification and preponderance of sex – premarital and extramarital - robbed it of its function as a conduit of specialness and intimacy and since childrearing is largely avoided (natality rates are precipitously plummeting everywhere) or outsourced, the family has lost both its raison d’être and its nature as the venue for exclusive sexual and emotional interactions between adults.

 

Professed values and prevailing social mores and institutions have yet to catch up to this emerging multifarious reality. The consequences of these discrepancies are disastrous: about 40-50% of all first-time marriages end in divorce and the percentage is much higher for second and third attempts at connubial bliss. Open communication about one’s sexual needs is tantamount to self-ruination as one’s partner is likely to reflexively initiate a divorce. Dishonesty and cheating are definitely the rational choices in such an unforgiving and punitive environment.

 

Indeed, most surviving marriages have to do with perpetuating the partners’ convenience, their access to commonly-owned assets and future streams of income, and the welfare of third parties, most notably their kids. Erstwhile sexual exclusivity often degenerates into celibacy or abstinence on the one hand – or parallel lives with multiple sexual and emotional partners on the other hand.

 

One night stands for both genders are usually opportunistic. Extra-pair affairs are self-limiting, as emotional involvement and sexual attraction wane over time. Infidelity is, therefore, much less of a threat to the longevity of a dedicated couple than it is made out to be. Most of the damage is caused by culturally-conditioned, albeit deeply and traumatically felt, reactions to conduct that is almost universally decried as deceitful, dishonest, and in breach of vows and promises.

 

Until recently, couples formed around promises of emotional exclusivity and sexual fidelity, uniqueness in each other’s mind and life, and (more common until the 1940s) virginity. Marriage was also a partnership: economic, or related to childrearing, or companionship. It was based on the partners’ past and background and geared towards a shared future.

 

Nowadays, couples coalesce around the twin undertakings of continuity (“I will ALWAYS be there for you”) and availability (“I will always BE there for you.”) Issues of exclusivity, uniqueness, and virginity have been relegated to the back-burner. It is no longer practical to demand of one’s spouse to have nothing to do with the opposite sex, not to spend the bulk of his or her time outside the marriage, not to take separate vacations, and, more generally, to be joined at the hip. Affairs, for instance – both emotional and sexual – are sad certainties in the life of every couple.

 

Members of the couple are supposed to make themselves continuously available to each other and to provide emotional sustenance and support in an atmosphere of sharing, companionship, and friendship. All the traditional functions of the family can now be – and often are – outsourced, including even sex and emotional intimacy. But, contrary to marriage, outsourcing is frequently haphazard and unpredictable, dependent as it is on outsiders who are committed elsewhere as well. Hence the relative durability of marriage, in its conservative and less-conventional forms alike: it is a convenient and highly practicable arrangement.

 

Divorce or other forms of marital breakup are not new phenomena. But their precipitants have undergone a revolutionary shift. In the past, families fell apart owing to a breach of exclusivity, mainly in the forms of emotional or sexual infidelity; a deficiency of uniqueness and primacy: divorced women, for instance, were considered “damaged goods” because they used to “belong” to another man and, therefore, could offer neither primacy nor uniqueness; or an egregious violation of the terms of partnership (for example: sloth, dysfunctional childrearing, infertility).

 

Nowadays, intimate partners bail out when the continuous availability of their significant others is disrupted: sexually, emotionally, or as friends and companions. Marriages are about the present and are being put to the test on a daily basis. Partners who are dissatisfied opt out and team up with other, more promising providers. Children are serially reared by multiple parents and in multiple households.

 

We idealize stereotypical gender roles: women are magic embodied in beauty and strength disguised as frailty. They originate life and sustain it through love. They are Nature. They are empathic and communicative. They form networks facilely. Women are also far tougher, far less romantic, and less empathic than men. They have to be: in a majority of cases, women are still their children's primary caregivers.

Millennia of suppression by men and their patriarchies led women to resort to the weapons of the weak and the stratagems of the underdog: underhanded goal-oriented manipulation, deception, and passive-aggression. Women are transactional: they habitually trade love and sex for economic security.

Studies show that women also intensely dislike other women, regard them as threats, and compete with them overtly and covertly. In the presence of men, though, they close ranks, fake solidarity, and defer to the males.

Now, ostensibly, the paradigm is shifting: women are no longer owned (though a majority of them are dependent on men as primary or sole breadwinners). Men are fighting back, terrified of the terra incognita of feminism.

 

But old habits die hard and inter-generational coping strategies are here to stay. Women be women and men be men for a while longer.

Relationships between men and women are at an all-time nadir and begin to border on open hostility and hatred. But people remain married to cheating spouses (adultery is rarely given as a cause in divorce cases). And they keep bringing children to the world. How come?

If you don't want to go single, it is rational to choose to stay with your current cheating partner: there is a 56% chance that your next partner will also cheat on you and a 73% chance that s/he will divorce you.

Cheating and deception are the new normal, trust a thing of the distant past. Marriages have become zero sum wrestling matches. Hence prenups and the burgeoning industries of couple therapists and divorce attorneys.

But why have kids with someone you cannot stand (the opposite sex)? Because of the signaling value of having kids. Parenthood is used to send a series of messages to oneself and to one's social milieu:

I am a proper man/woman;

I am not a psychosexual or social "deviant" or "pervert", I am "normal" and conform to the values and mores of my society (I am not a homosexual, for example)

I am accomplished, I have a family, I am leaving something behind me to prove that I have existed;

I am not immature or selfish, I am a responsible, functional adult.

Kids are also used as currency in transactional marriages: a way for the man to exert control over the woman and inhibit her behaviors - and a way for the woman to bind the man to her and to her offspring as a form of financial annuity.

 

Gender Vertigo

 

Our narcissistic and increasingly more psychopathic civilization legitimizes and rewards psychopaths, both male and female. In women, Antisocial Personality Disorder is strongly associated with both Borderline and Histrionic personalities as well as with childhood abuse and trauma and with dissociative states and disorders.

The structural tectonic shift in gender roles fostered a unigender world where there are only men with two different sets of genitalia. In such an anomic universe borderline psychopathic women florish: their goal-focused manipulativeness, impulsive aggression, emotional dysregulation, and lack of empathy are rendered assets rather than liabilities.

Feminism (suffragism, women's lib) which started off as a laudable human rights movement aimed at leveling the playing field had metastasized into a sexist, hate-filled, utterly narcissistic and delusional power play.

Enslaved by men for millennia, women rose, enraged and fuelled by seething resentment and often misandry. They are now doing to men what men did to them with impunity for so long, giving emasculated and dazed males a taste of their own bitter medicine.

And this internecine mass suicide is only starting as we hurl ourselves off cliffs of intoxicated vanity and fear of the Other.

 

Life can never be meaningful without meaningful interpersonal relationships, especially with intimate partners or significant others, including friends. Narcissists, psychopaths, histrionics, and borderlines are incapable of having such profound connections, each disorder for its own psychodynamic reasons.

Consequently, even in the best of times and when they are goal-focused, the lives of these people are aimless, diffuse, derealized, depersonalizes, confabulated, and dissociative. They meander and wander and stumble through their lives as if they were on a stage set, sempiternal, disinterested, and mildly curious observers of the comings and goings.

Often they end up hurting and traumatizing others more by their absence than by their presence. Lacking object constancy, their "nearest and dearest" are out of mind when they are out of sight. Splitting helps them to justify egregiously immoral, antisocial, harmful, and hurtful misconduct: if your partner or friend is suddenly all bad, intentionally frustrating, persecutory, and evil - surely whatever you do to him or her is in self-defense.

In his unsurpassed masterpiece, "The Mask of Sanity", Cleckley suggests that meaningful relationships "influence to consistent, purposive behavior". Studies - like Lisa Wade's - are demonstrating that the young have elevated meaninglessness to an item of faith: it is bad taste to attach to your sex partner and dating is down 50%, replaced by hookups. Problem is: meaninglessness is malignant and metastasizes to all other areas of life, including marriage (or partnership) and parenthood. It is a psychopathic fixture and goes hand in hand with "pseudologica fantastica" (pathological lying), as Dan Ariely had convincingly demonstrated.

 

We don't need any additional humans: at 8 billion, we have reached the planet's maximum capacity to sustain us. Birth rate have declined precipitously across the world, with contraceptives and abortion as means of birth control. The majority now marry very late or not at all. Procreation is dead as we transition to the age of solitary recreation.

Most of our social institutions were rendered obsolete by this tectonic shift. There is no further need for marriage, monogamy, sexual exclusivity, family, parenting, love, intimacy, long-term relationships, and non-casual, emotionally meaningful sex.

Gender roles have been effectively abolished as men and women act and think exactly the same way, disparate genitalia notwithstanding.

Since we don't need to procreate, there is no reason to cohabit, bond, or form attachments. Technology rendered us utterly self-sufficient. Casual sex is an ample solution, soon to be replaced by humanoid sex dolls and holographic porn. The very concept of society is antiquated: it was meant to provide a safe environment for raising children and for the transfer of wealth to future generations. The individual is now the only viable organizing principle. Hence the all-drowning tsunami of grandiosity and dysempathic egotism that is sweeping across the globe indiscriminately.

Indeed, language itself has to adapt. There is no future without children: only an everlasting carpe diem hedonistic present. No wonder mindfulness is all the rage.

 

In this topsy-turvy world, women prefer and meek weak men, weasels, and losers to alpha males who are well-accomplished and supremely self-confident. How come?

An inferior man is far less likely to reject a woman's sexual and romantic advances - the type of rejection that, in most women, causes emotional dysregulation amidst a plummeting sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

A weakling allows the woman to occupy center stage as the life of the party, and garner attention from others to her heart's content while he remains silent, obsequious, and acquiescent.

A weasel commonly grants the woman in his life the latitude to misbehave. Owing to his abandonment anxiety and limited options, he is far more tolerant of abuse and lets the woman make all the decisions by herself - including egregiously immoral, bad, or wrong decisions -without consulting him or seeking his opinion or approval.

As a tsunami of wounded women emerge from abusive and dysfunctional relationships, they seek mates and intimate partners who would not abuse them all over and who allow them to assert control and exert dominance, do not threaten them or their cherished victim stance, their sense of unbounded entitlement, their alloplastic defenses ("I cheated, but it was the men's fault, not mine"), and their elevated narcissistic defenses.

Finally, some women choose precisely such unattractive men because they are feeling self-destructive and want to trash themselves as bad, worthless, and sluttish.

 

Attractiveness is gender-neutral. Of course, depending to the genders involved in the interaction, it may lead to sex, romance, bromance, or any other outcome on a spectrum of friendship and collaboration. But both men and women react with attraction or repulsion to other men and women.

Attractiveness is a composite of character traits and behaviors. But to be deemed attractive, these have to conform to social and cultural mores, prejudices, and preferences. What would be considered attractive in one civilization would be judged off-putting in another.

Language plays a role. Stinginess can also be described as frugality. Eloquence as verbosity. Self-care as vanity. Self-confidence as narcissism.

The context is influential. Peer consensus is crucial: women find more attractive men who are always in the company of other women. The time of day, alcohol consumption, events immediately preceding the encounter all matter.

Surprisingly, body shape and good looks are less crucial and far more variable than they are made out to be by evolutionary biologists. In different parts of the world, opposite body shapes (lanky versus fat, for example) attract and criteria of beauty are disparate.

It seems that the mind plays the biggest role: the brain is indeed the largest sex organ. Intelligence, resourcefulness, optimism, charisma, self assurance, sense of humor, kindness, creativity, generosity are all far more critical than possessing the right kind of body.

 

He is stingy, she - profligate. He is a recluse, she is gregarious. He is asexual, she is promiscuous. Glaring incompatibilities in grossly mismatched couples. Why do people trap themselves in long term relationships with their exact negations and polar opposites?

For three reasons:

1. The new inappropriate partner is chosen after a failed relationship precisely because he is the mirror image, the photographic negative of the previous, disastrous choice. Contrast overshadows all other considerations: a sense of relief and safety.

2. The mismatched partner provides an external locus of control and outsourced regulation of traits and behaviors that are perceived as undesirable, a check of unwanted aspects of the personality. In the examples above: the profligate partner delegates money management to her frugal counterpart; the recluse uses his partner's gregariousness to meet people; and the promiscuous husband restrains himself by remaining faithful to his frigid wife.

3. The mismatch and obvious incompatibility put paid to intimacy and usually, in the longer haul, to sex and love. These lacunas and lacks provide the partners with a moral justification to misbehave: cheat on one another, deceive each other, even steal from each other. Socially unacceptable conduct is legitimized. We sympathize with a long suffering intimate partner or spouse and tend to be more lenient in our judgment. People who fear intimacy or loathe will make sure that their primary relationship never has any and strive to lead separate, parallel lives.

 

Can a man interact with a woman without invoking sex? If he is not attracted to the woman or if he had initiated intimacy and had been rejected, he can. But then he no longer regards the woman as a woman - but as The Other.

For a man to perceive The Other as a Woman, to react to her femininity, the promise of sex, the potential for sex, or actual sexual acts must exist. In their absence, the man recognizes merely the Otherness of the woman: it has a different body, distinct cognitive and emotional processing, eccentric decision-making procedures. It is exotic, enigmatic, and mysterious. But to the man, it is not a woman anymore.

Every person - man or woman - is The Other: an entire universe, accessible only via language and empathy. Sex is a third mode of communication and accessibility which, alone among all other modes of interaction, renders us men and women.

If course, well-mannered men, especially in certain cultures and societies, go through the motions: they open doors, give flowers or gifts, court chivalrously, and listen rapturously. But these are all routines intended to disguise the yawning lack of interest that arises when the spectre of sex is gone. Gradually, the parties drift apart.

If to start with, the man does not find the woman attractive, there is the potential for friendship or companionship or collaboration. Sex does not get in the way. But even then, the relationship is among equals but different - not between a man and a woman.

This is why in sexless marriages, men and women end up being companions, roommates, partners in business, merely parents, or good friends, if they are lucky. But they no longer see each other as man and woman (which only exacerbates the sexual aversion).

 

Typology of Women and Men

 

There are three types of women: homemakers, backpack adventurers, and luxury cruisers. All women, including career women, belong to one of these three encampments.

The homemaker derives happiness from home and hearth, children and kitchen. Recent studies show that ever more women revert to these traditional roles as a refuge from an increasingly more menacing world. They value stability and intimacy more than success, thrills, and wealth.

The backpack adventurer is itinerant and peripatetic. She dreads stagnation and feels suffocated in familiar settings and with too much intimacy. She travels light and sometimes alone. She is frugal and abstemious. She may choose professions such as war correspondent, diplomat, sales executive, or volunteer in a charity. She answers to no one. She is very curious and cherishes her liberty and autonomy above all else. Many of these women are single or single mothers.

The luxury cruiser loves comfort and opulence. She can be vulgar or have a refined taste. She can run her own business empire or be a serial golddigger. But her happiness consists in the freedom and safety that unlimited dollops of money and what it can buy afford her. She is into brands and status symbols and is very competitive and envious. She climbs the social ladder one bed at a time. She is a huntress and a predator, often s femme fatale. Family, emotions, attachment, and other such trappings pale in significance besides her addiction to sumptuous consumption.

Men come in a bewildering array of shapes, sizes, and colors. Yet, they relate to women in one of four ways:

1. The Idealizer-Mystifier

 

Regards women as mythical, mystical, magical creatures, endowed with supernatural powers to mother, mend hearts and break them. These men, when rebuffed, become stalkers and erotomaniacs.

2. The Woman Lover

Loves and adores everything feminine. Truly interested in women as persons: their lives, interests, emotions, and thoughts. Considers women exotic and alluring but not alien and irresistible.

3. The Woman Hater (misogynist)

Regards all women as rapacious, merciless, dangerous, and narcissistic predators, devoid of true emotions and loyalties. Fears women and loathes them or holds them in unmitigated contempt. All women are for sale to the highest bidder (whores) and best avoided or enslaved as a precautionary measure.

4. The User

Considers women as mere utilitarian functions: uses their bodies to masturbate with; demands and expects to be worshipped by them; absconds with their money; leverages their business contacts. Their role in his life is to serve obediently and unthinkingly in a variety of roles: sex slave, cook, maid, punching beg, witness to glorious accomplishment, acolyte, student.

 

These are four dysfunctional attitudes to women:

1. The Woman Lover idealizes women and regards them as an enigmatic force of nature, a mysterious fount of fascinating magical otherness and of womblike immersion. He is addicted to women: their aesthetic, smells, voices, rituals, quirks, and emotions. Places each woman he meets at the crosshairs of his undivided, rapturous, and breathless attention.

2. The Woman Hater regards women as menacing, manipulative, dark, evil, scheming, and heartless sorceresses out to pulverize his heart and deplete his wallet. He treats women with hostility and contempt that often morph into aggressive animosity.

3. The Nerdish Drone treats women as men with a different set of genitalia. To him, all women are strictly potential partners in the startup that is his life: toiling accomplices in family, business, and social functions. All work and no play. Relationships with them are tedious and grinding, though could also be companionable and friendly. Not much fire there. Life is an endless stream of analyses, negotiations, rules, and transactions till death them do part.

4. The Narcissist homes in and captures women to be his slaves: sex dolls, service providers, and captive audience to his grandiose schemes and fantastic exploits. Abhors, fears, and is enraged by independent-minded women who pursue their own self-actualization and refuse to adulate him uncritically. He is the center of attention, the star - and women are his mere peripheral satellites.

 

Women, on the other hand, regard all men as raw materials: coarse, at times fatuous, unnecessarily aggressive, and invariably puerile. Inevitably, they end up being frustrated, disappointed, and enraged when they fail to shape, mould, educate, reform, direct, manipulate, or teach the men in their lives.

Men regard all women as hopelessly finished products, beyond logic, growth, or transformation. They accept the women in their lives as frivolous, flawed, inexplicable, enigmatic, irrational, manipulative, and capricious beings. They do their best to work around the true, rigid, and fully-formed nature of their females.

Both misperceptions yield inefficient coping strategies and lead to erroneous decisions. The hostile gap between men and women has never yawned bigger. As women encroach on traditionally male territory and adopt male roles and behaviors, the misunderstandings multiply. We are very near a tipping point of a total disconnect between men and women. This is one thing our species will not survive.

 

Some heterosexual women intensely dislike and reject their gender and even sex. This usually has to do with a developed sense of competitiveness with other women and with internalized misogyny. Identifying with woman-haters, especially in sexist and chauvinistic families or societies, has an adaptative value and guarantees favorable outcomes.

Women are reified by the vagina which is described by misogynists as dark, wet, deep, contaminated and minacious (like the medieval vagina dentata). Even children - women's main and prized distinction - do not appeal to women who hate women and are perceived as a freedom-denying burden.

Female misogynists like men a lot, identify with them, and seek to emulate them. Men are epitomized by the penis which is viewed by such women as clean, erect, visible, and proud. Masculine qualities are praiseworthy: men are protectors and providers.

The sexual style of female misogynists is also closer to the stereotype of man than woman: they hunt for men, cocktease aggressively, fuck perfunctorily and selfishly, get up and leave. Their sex involves infatuation and idealization, but rarely any true, deep, and lasting emotion. They are interested in things and pursuits that typically interest men.

Still, the female misogynist is a woman. So, she hates this aspect of herself and casts her femininity as whorish, bad, labile, and risky. She would tend to be sociosexually unrestrictive (promiscuous). The female misogynist tends to pair with a male woman-hater. After all, they share the same view of women. Yet, she believes that he should treat her as the only exception. But when he does treat her as the exception, when he relates to her as the only woman who is as good as a man (and therefore avoids having sex with her or refrains from courting her) - she resents him. She takes revenge on him, and punishes him, behaving exactly like a "typical woman" and further justifying his misogyny!

 

Feminism, Gender, Sex

 

Feminism caricatured men into a one-dimensional stereotype and women now aspire to become that caricature: they drink heavily, curse profusely, are "in your face, fuck you" antisocial and defiant, promiscuously and indiscriminately engage in emotionless one night stands, become workaholics, cheat on their intimate partners, and, generally act as grandiose and entitled narcissists, devoid of any hint of empathy.

When confronted about their egregious misconduct, women respond indignantly with the "double standard" standard argument: "This is what men also do, no?" The answer is: absolutely not. Only some men behave this way and they are widely frowned upon, decried, and held in contempt by the vast majority of males.

Men and women should be utterly equal when it comes to all public goods (education, healthcare), all manner of rights, access, wages paid, economic opportunities, the law, treatment by the authorities, and in society.

Equal but different.

Gender differences are the poetry and engine of life itself: sexual attraction, family formation, procreation, romantic love.

But now women want to be IDENTICAL to men, not merely EQUAL and this threatens the very existence of the species.

What is much worse:

In their attempts to emulate men, women use the feminist sexist caricature of the "typical" male as a template: a drunk and vulgar man-whore womanizer who cheats on his spouse and works himself to death in a jungle hostile universe.

Women have learned to mistrust men: about half them are bitter and broken victims of abuse, divorced, single mothers, impoverished, and hopeless.

Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW) - a movement in the manosphere of men who renounce all contact with women - is merely a reaction to the fact that women have gone their own way a long time ago. There are no women left, only narcissists with a different genital apparatus. How tragic that we have lost each other, men and women. How heartbreaking.

 

Men are giving up on women and resorting to other men for intimacy and sex.

 

Homosexuality, homoeroticism, same sex attraction, and MSM (Men having Sex with Men) have been increasing year on year all over the world. This is not only the outcome of gay practices becoming more acceptable. In my view, this is because there are no women left

 

Women dress like men, curse like men, drink like men, are as promiscuous and aggressive as men, are as narcissistic and dysempathic as men, cheat on their spouses and intimate partners at the same rate as men do, have become primary breadwinners, are taking over many traditional blue collar and white collar male vocations, are single mothers, and are better educated than men.

 

Unigender: there are only men with penises and men with vaginas. No women. So, some men go for the original - why opt for the imitation?

 

Freud predicted all this mayhem inadvertently when he described "penis envy". He said that women feel incomplete without the male appendage and unconsciously attempt to emulate men.

 

But what even he could not have predicted is the convergence of gender roles and the resulting "gender vertigo". In a world without women, homosexuality is an increasingly rational choice: the genitalia are familiar, the emotions and reactive patterns clearer and more predictable, tolerance is higher, and mutual expectations way more realistic and thus much easier to gratify

 

Consequently, men are ignoring and discarding women in droves and in a variety of ways. Most women now go without a man for years at a time and are reduced to picking up strangers in bars for one night stands.

 

I attribute the disappearance of sex to four developments: (1) Gender vertigo: the shifting gender roles and the ensuing gender wars which engender sexual disorientation (2) The rise of addictive social media, online games, immersive augmentative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and similar technologies (3) The wide availability of porn and (4) The emergence of casual, emotionless sex as the preferred sexual practice (the decline of intimacy)

The explosion of dating sites proves how impossible it is to obtain sex in one's milieu. People have to go online and hook up with strangers, often in other countries, in a desperate bid to gratify this most basic and natural of needs.

There is a surging global subculture of misogynism (woman hatred) that women have been ignoring at their peril: incels (involuntary celibates), MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), pickup artists, redpillers (men who "realize" that women rule the world and are cruelly manipulating men), blackpillers (men who give up on ever having any sexual or romantic relationship with women), and so on.

Many in these groups espouse militancy and even violence against women.

Such strident misogynism is new. Woman hatred is not (see the works of Otto Weininger and August Strindberg a century ago). 😧

I wrote this when I was 19 anticipating recent developments by more than four decades:

 

"I think that there is a schism between men and women. I am sorry but I am neo-Weiningerian. I fear women and loathe them viscerally - while, in the abstract, I recognize that they are members of the human species and eligible to the same rights as men do. Still, the biological, biochemical and psychological differences between us (men versus women) are so profound that I think that a good case can be made in favour of a theory which will assign them to another (perhaps even more advanced) species. I am heterosexual, so it has nothing to do with sexual preferences. Also I know that what I have to say will alienate and anger you. Still, I believe - as does Dr. Grey - that cross-gender communication is all but impossible. We are separated by biology, by history, by culture, by chemistry, by genetics, in short: by too much. Where we see cruelty they see communication, where we see communication they see indifference, where we see a future they see a threat, where we see a threat they see an opportunity, where we see stagnation they see security and where we see safety they see death, where we get excited they get alarmed, where we get alarmed they get bored, we love with our senses, they love with their wombs and mind, they tend to replicate, we tend to assimilate, they are Trojan horses, we are dumb Herculeses, they succumb in order to triumph, we triumph in order to succumb."

 

More and more financially emancipated women mimic psychopathic men, adopting both their misbehaviors and their traits. A curious gender inversion seems to be occurring: men are assuming hitherto feminine roles and reactive patterns.

For example: judging by numerous reports from the crowded clinics of couple therapists, men are now more sex averse ("frigid") than women (they compensate with porn), they are more romantic, and are more likely to be infatuated and to suggest to transition to a committed relationship after a bout of casual sex (women overwhelmingly decline such overtures for further contact after one night stands). Many men are stay at home dads as women become primary breadwinners.

Women are catching up to men in the frequency of cheating on their intimate partners and the number of one night stands, especially when these involve drinking or other forms of substance abuse.

In many places, more women than men frequent singles bars and dives and women are surging on dating apps where three quarters of them admit to scouting for anonymous sex partners or infidelity accomplices. Women sue for 73% of all divorces.

The floodgates are wide open: in a unigender world, gender roles are fluid and often inverted. Gender vertigo ensued followed by male avoidance in a misogynistic manosphere (MGTOW, red-pillers, incels)

This is part and parcel of a bigger trend: the ascent of aloneness. More and more people of both genders - since 2016 in the West, at least, the majority - choose to live alone: they find their own exclusive company irresistible. Technology rendered us utterly self-sufficient, so why be bothered with the quirks, moods, emotions, and expectations of others? Procreation, marriage, and family are phased out. Sex is gradually displaced by porn and occasional casual masturbation with other people's bodies. When it comes to relationships, the prize is just not worth the price.

 

Women are newly emancipated slaves: mistreated as chattel property by men since the agricultural and urban revolutions thousands of years ago, they have rebelled and prevailed. But a collective psychology shaped over millennia cannot be undone or modified within a few decades: society and its agents - parents foremost - had brainwashed girls and inculcated in them rigid, stereotypical gender roles, replete with coping and survival strategies in a male-dominated world.

Women were conditioned to make use of the surreptitious weapons of the weak: to manipulate; undermine passive-aggressively; feign weakness, clinging, and codependent neediness; and extort economic benefits, often by triangulating or by getting pregnant.

Having acquired civil rights and economic prowess, women lacked a credible behavioral-social model to introject and follow. Instead, they started to emulate and imitate male caricatures which comprise pronounced psychopathic features: dysempathic machoism, promiscuity, defiant reactance, recklessness, infidelity, antisocial conduct, and substance abuse. In a way, women are pathetically trying to be more men than men.

Such abrupt discarding of traditional gender roles in a unigender universe has led to gender vertigo, gender alienation, gender dysphoria, misogyny, misandry, and a tsunami of auto-eroticism (masturbation with porn, incest, and homosexuality, for instance). A decline in births to below the replacement rate and the collapse if inter-gender communication and institutions (family, marriage) and behaviors (dating, meaningless sex) followed ineluctably.

 

Casual Sex

 

The separation of emotions from sex has challenged our very ability to experience, engender, or enjoy intimacy within stable dyads.

Men have been incapacitated by such practices for millennia now. Currently, women are defiantly and ostentatiously going the same broken road of promiscuity and near-anonymous, masturbatory casual sex.

Emotionless sex is pathological: it is psychopathic and schizoid. It involves the objectification and dehumanization of the partner in an ambience of fake instant intimacy. Hence the splitting defense known as the Madonna-whore complex, for example.

Rampantly available casual sex removes the incentives to commit or to invest in a relationship and leads to atomization, alienation, and malignant, froward self-sufficiency.

Hundreds of studies have concluded that people born after 1995 have severe intimacy, relationships, and sexual deficits (they are largely asexual in between rare hookups) even as the rates of schizoid withdrawal (think social media), depression, and anxiety among them have skyrocketed. Watch my video on youth sexlessness.

 

When confronted about certain social practices, many dredge up examples from primitive societies and ancient cultures to buttress their case: "Promiscuity was the dominant sexual practice among the Tahitians!", they exclaim, "Our sexual exclusivity and monogamy are throwbacks to the dark Victorian age! Why get stuck on such fixations?"

Sociobiologists, ecologists, behaviorist psychologists, ethologists, and environmental activists keep reminding us that the way we act and our choices are "not natural". They legitimize as "only natural" misconduct that is normally and rightly frowned upon: "But chimpanzees and gorillas behave exactly the same way!", they triumphantly proclaim, "Why not revert to Nature? Surely billions of years of evolution can't be wrong!"

This romantic view of the noble savage and idealization of nature are counterfactual. Savages were and are just that: savage. Nature is nasty, brutish, and psychopathic.

We spent our entire history as a species decisively putting behind us our primitive unlamented ancestry, natural and societal. Mindless casual sex and cannibalism are best avoided, for example.

True, we are the custodians of Nature. But Guardians do not emulate (or harm!) their minor charges. We are the adults in the room. We should act as ones. We should preserve what we can, adhere to caution, use the rest. We should not deteriorate and degenerate by mimesis: we should make sure that we never become lobsters or primates.

 

There are two kinds of intimacy: one that leads to sex and another that inhibits it.

The first kind is almost instant and is based on physical attraction. Coupled with kindness and attentiveness, the parties feel safe precisely because they are strangers: no strings attached, never likely to meet again. They can afford to let go, share, be themselves, allow all masks to slip, and cater unabashedly, even recklessly, to their deepest urges.

Providing that the encounter did not end with abuse or assault, a whiff of the intimacy lingers on as a fond, lifelong memory. Sometimes, the one night stand evolves into a friendship, with or without benefits.

The second variant of intimacy is the mirror image of the first: it hails from a total absence of sexual tension. The parties feel secure exactly because sex is not in the air. As familiarity creeps in glacially, intimacy builds up. It is like the comfort of an old slipper and the coziness of a fireplace in dead winter.

Problems start when expectations mismatch: the homely friend aspires to become the torrid lover and the casual sex partner falls in love. Once rebuffed and spurned, they both feel exploited and abused.

 

Multiple studies have shown that both men and women miss the overwhelming majority of flirting cues and behaviors. Men flirt to score (have sex), women flirt in order to feel connected, have fun, and reaffirm their desirability.

Styles of courting and flirting prefigure the type and quality of the ensuing sex: direct and transactional flirting indicates brutal and self-interested copulation.

Subtle though unambiguous flirting, especially one based on a fantasy or fairy narrative (fabulous) is creative, imaginative, indirect, and puts the woman at the centre as a damsel in distress, diva, goddess, or princess. Women use two bits of data to proceed to sex: 1. Is he nice and kind to me and 2. Does he find me irresistible. Contrary to myths online, everything else matters very little.

Such complex flirting guarantees orgasm: women react to clitoral stimulation, role play, fantasies, and dirty talk much more than to thrust, Sturm und Drang. Diplomacy wins in the sack with women, not a military campaign.

Schizoids and some types of narcissists (sadistic, for example) find flirting and courting excruciatingly boring, wasteful, and off-putting chores. They are auto-erotic and merely wish to use the woman’s body to masturbate with.

 

There is a marked decrease in dating (-50%) and relational sex and a pronounced increase in the frequency of casual stranger sex. Recently, I posted two lengthy videos about promiscuity and casual sex. I left three issues to be explored in a future feature:

1. The proliferation of sublimatory channels.

Sexual energy (a manifestation of the libido, the life force) can be converted and directed into other, socially conformist, venues, like artistic creativity or politics.

Modern technologies have empowered us and granted us access to so many new or hitherto inaccessible activities that sex had been pushed to the bottom of the list. Simply, we are too busy to copulate and sex has to compete with other equipotent distractions and diversions.

2. The male brain perceives pornography as the real thing. The female brain similarly reacts to erotic and chic lit. This renders sex with a flesh and blood partner a poor, logistically fraught substitute best avoided except as a last resort.

3. As both men and women became way more narcissistic or even psychopathic and as the numbers of broken and damaged victims and survivors of abuse proliferated, the pool of eligible acceptable partners shrank dramatically. People are more demanding, self-centred, dysempathic, grandiose, defiant, impulsive, incapable of attachment and bonding, leery of intimacy, and less prone to compromise.

The effort and performance required today in establishing and maintaining a viable longish-term dyad far outweigh and outstrip anything expected in the past. Breakups, divorces, and infidelity are stratospherically high - so, why bother? The prize is no longer worth the price and it is all for one night, anyhow.

 

In apps such as TikTok and Instagram, youngsters are sharing with each other relationship advice the gist of which is: if you desire someone, you should play on their insecurities and gaslight them. Pure and simple.

These messages teach not only approach-avoidance as a conditioning technique but they also advise the young to fake emotions - never have genuine ones - and to separate sex from emotions.

According to recent studies (by Lisa Wade and others), among people under 25 the ONLY kind of sex is casual and emotionless (one night stands). Among people between 25-35 casual, meaningless, and largely anonymous sex is the dominant, main type of sex.

The young are so used to separate sex from love and intimacy that they are not having almost any sex with intimate partners!!! Sexlessness in committed relationship is the norm. Instead, they pick up strangers in bars or acquaintances and friends and they cheat: infidelity is at an all time high and the majority of people under 35 - both men and women - now cheat serially.

Actually, interpersonal relationships among the young are open in anything but name: the members of the couple let each other sleep with others occasionally (DADT- Don't Ask, Don't Tell)

I call it the "Intimacy Cloud": young men and women are sexually and emotionally intimate with multiple people all the time, even when they are married or in an otherwise supposedly monogamous dyad. They have emotional affairs and sleep with classmates, former lovers, besties, old flames, colleagues, and so on.

Approach-avoidance and triangulation - insecurity and jealousy - are the main relationship management tools among the young. But to make use of such instrument efficaciously, they must remain aloof and calculated: they cannot allow themselves to really love or desire anyone. Flat affect is de rigeur as are narcissistic and psychopathic traits and behaviors.

 

Pick-up artists (PUA) are communities of men, guided by self-imputed "experts" who purport to have found the exact sequences of buttons to push to get a woman to succumb and offer access to her body.

They fail to see the irony: like homebroken and trained puppies they jump through hoops held high by females and adhere religiously to a script written entirely by the fairer sex: "You want to sleep with me? You have to go through these motions and act clownishly for hours"

I have even less respect for self-disparaging and self-loathing incels who whine constantly and pathetically about being shunned by women and how they have a god-given right to sex, by force if need be (black pillers). Some of these misfits even undergo extensive cosmetic surgeries to fix their "facial deformities", a form if body dysmorphic insanity known as lookmaxing.

Red pillers are more benign: they claim only to have seen the light and the true nature of women as rapacious and psychopathic entities who leverage the institutions of society to their unbridled and dysempathic benefit.

The logical extension of this alleged power asymmetry is to avoid all committed relationships (casual sex is fine): enter MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way)

There is no question that traditional gender roles are dead and that sex has become merely a physical function, no longer associated with intimacy. Both men and women feel disoriented and overlooked in this maelstrom of gender vertigo.

It is also true that women are empowered and, having been only recently emancipated, are imitating the traits and behaviors of antisocial men. It is a veritably post-apocalyptic age for relationships and dating.

But the solution is not avoidance or manipulation. We need a new social contract between the bearers of disparate genitalia. And we need with our heads rather than with our nether organs.

 

Instances of casual sex will explode after the pandemic is over. But too much casual sex can impair your ability to associate sex with intimacy: if you do it with strangers often enough, your own partner is rendered just another stranger, a statistic. One night stands become the norm and how you think about sex. Habits mold our neuroplastic brain. Meaningful relationships become impossible in a world of meaningless, physical, often drunk sex: you bond to your mate in every way, except sexually. People under age 35 - the generations of hookups and dating apps - are already experiencing this self-inflicted disability whenever they try to have a more significant liaison.

Here are some psychosexual rules to follow to mitigate this risk:

1. Never spend too much time with your casual sex partner before you hit the sack. Time shared engenders attachment and intimacy and transforms what should have been a harmless one-off experience into a more meaningful variant, replete with budding emotions (such as affection or even gratitude). Confronted with these mixed signals, our brains react by linking casual sex to intimacy. Henceforth, you will pursue intimacy only in bars and via occasional romps. Bad idea.

2. Exclude certain sex acts and reserve them only for your loved ones. Don't do absolutely everything with everyone, promiscuously or indiscriminately. Refuse to realize all the sexual fantasies of your casual sex partner. Maintain an island of uniqueness and exclusivity: your body should be used to tell your intimate partner how special he or she is to you. If there is nothing you haven't done before with total strangers or acquaintances - in which way can you make your mate feel chosen and unprecedented in your sex life?

3. Don't have too many one night encounters too often. Don't sever the neural pathways that connect sex to deep and abidingly profound intimacy. Do not overuse your sexuality off-handedly, transforming it into just another bodily function, a mere exchange of excretions, a form of masturbating with other people's genitalia. Do not debase sex to the point that you will think nothing of cheating on your partner or doing it when drunk, wasted, or stoned senseless. Respect yourself and be mindful of the trust issues (and real-life hurt and dangers) that a totally carefree, anarchic attitude to sex can create.

Casual sex can be fun once in a while and can restore one's sense of wellbeing and self-esteem. If it conforms to one's values and upbringing, it is ego-syntonic and not disruptive. There is nothing wrong with it inherently. But like everything else in life, overuse can be detrimental to your psychological health and to your ability to nurture a future connection with that other special person. You can overdose on casual sex. Recent statistics show that young men have 6 and young women a little over 4 such encounters a year. Women are catching up to men. This is way too much. It is toxic.

 

There are three types of promiscuity: frequency, conditional-contextual, and standards.

In Frequency Promiscuity, the quantity of partners and sexual encounters is statistically abnormal - but some criteria and standards are maintained throughout with regards to mate selection, what little time is spent together, minimal emotions (liking the partner, affection, feeling good in his company), and behavioral choices.

In Standards Promiscuity, the numbers of sexual liaisons and disparate partners are not always high but there are no thresholds or benchmarks as to the type of partner chosen or which behaviors are deemed unacceptable: anyone and anything go.

In Conditional Promiscuity, women reward with sex anyone - even a "bad guy" - who is "nice" to them (attentive, protective, and possessive) and finds them irresistibly desirable. It is a meaningless transactional exchange: emotionless sex swapped for worn out pickup lines: better the wrong kind of attention than none.

The first type of promiscuity is not really casual sex: it involves getting to know the prospective sex partner however superficially and cursorily. The second type is compulsive (intended to ameliorate anxiety and depression) and ego dystonic or impulsive (reckless, emotionless, novelty-seeking behavior) and ego syntonic.

Examples:

A heterosexual man who is frequency promiscuous would trawl bars or swipe dating apps to pick up partners for casual sex. But he would be selective as to the physical type of the partner, her psychology, and background. He would also not do drugs or get drunk senseless or visit a brothel. He would spend some time with her, getting to know her better and making up his mind whether he wants to copulate with her or not.

A heterosexual woman who is standards promiscuous will rarely have a one night stand but, when she does, will do it with anyone anywhere at any time. She would also get drunk senseless, do drugs, go to strip clubs, let herself be groped in public or by multiple men, even make herself available to gangbangs, and so on: no standards or inhibitions.

 

The common wisdom when I was growing up was that as men get older, they have a greater number of potential partners (age hypergamy)

As women age, they have a shrinking pool of possible mates (age hypogamy). This evolutionary asymmetry had always had profound social implications: it affected the structure of our societies as well our institutions and the ways they functioned, both formal (codified mores and norms) and informal.

All this is beginning to change for the first time since the agricultural revolution, thousands of years ago. Women are emancipated sexually and financially and are gradually taking over the reins. They are adopting hitherto exclusively masculine - even defiantly antisocial - behaviors, including ones pertaining to mate choice and selection.

Sex hypogamy is the new normal: women prefer to stay single and childless, wedded to their careers and self-actualization as they sleep only with beta, weak, emasculated men, usually in hookups or short-term "relationships". Our dystopian reality is unigender: it is a world without women, only two types of men with different genitalia.

Sex hypergamy - a preference for accomplished strong alpha males even for casual sex - is out the window. Women want to be on top in every possible way

So, red pillers are right about the 80/20 Paretto principle: 80 percent of women do want to sleep with only 20 percent of all men. But they got the 20 percent wrong: women want to copulate with the 20 percent who are beta males! Women assiduously avoid the intimidating and challenging alpha men whose success and prowess constitute an unbearable narcissistic injury to the competitive, independent female.

 

Promiscuity and alcohol abuse - often linked - are now veritable pandemics among women of all ages. The rates of cheating are now almost equal between men and women. Casual sex - hookups and one night stands - is fast becoming the exclusive sexual practice among socially isolated females addicted to social media. The picture is still worse among men, but the gap is closing fast or reversing with some behaviors and lifestyle choices.

Cheating and promiscuity are now common reactions to neglect, abuse, rejection, monotony, or indifference in ostensibly intimate relationships.

Promiscuity and cheating are so widespread because sex has been reduced to a mere mechanical-pneumatic exercise, an emotionless act of masturbation with near anonymous and objectified partners, reminiscent of porn. Devoid of its function as an expression of intimacy and love, women no longer feel guilty or ashamed to engage in this largely meaningless purely physical activity.

Add to this the ease of finding sexual partners online; the veritable supernova of growing abuse of all manner of substances; the tsunami of broken and abusive relationships; the virulent collapse of inter-gender communication; the dysfunctioning of social institutions; social atomization, isolation, and anomie; and the evaporation of inhibitory social and religious mores - and you get the perfect storm of everyone copulating with everyone recklessly and with utter disregard for consequences: medical, moral, social, psychological, and for the traumatic effects on their loved ones.

 

Investing in a relationship may have become an irrational strategy in this day and age:

Prenups made communal property obsolete.

Divorce is the not so new normal and is much easier than it used to be. Children are accustomed to it and have learned to expect and accept breakups as an ineluctable and preordained part of life.

Sex is cost-free and has been reduced to mutual masturbation, stripped of all its attendant emotional and cognitive components. Hookups and other forms of casual sex as well as porn rule.

The pool of available partners is practically infinite. Mate selection is no longer affected by scarcity and the fear of remaining alone. People have become disposable, dispensable, and interchangeable.

Digital identities on social media and dating sites are largely fake: people flood each other with accurate information on the trifling aspects of their lives - but lie egregiously about all critical issues, from their appearance to STDs. It renders intimacy all but impossible.

 

Sex can be a way to avoid intimacy rather than experience or enhance it. By reducing the partners to fetishized body parts or objectifying them into animated dildos and dolls, the act becomes impersonal and auto-erotic rather than intimate. The partner remains largely anonymous and is then discarded perfunctorily and is easily forgotten.

Such casual one night stands usually occur a short time into a random meeting with a stranger in a bar or a party. Few meaningful words are exchanged: bodies speak and seductive flirtation usurps real conversation and getting to know each other. Even just hanging out, having fun is perceived as a wasteful prologue best truncated. People think with their crotches and reduce the other to his or her genitalia and erogenous zones.

This urgency and one track mindedness are what distinguish true casual sex from a first and even only consummated date.

 

Men have casual sex mostly for two reasons: 1. The woman makes clear that she is available or 2. They find the woman attractive. Period. They make no bones about it and feel no need to spin complex stories to embed the sex in some exculpatory context.

Women have casual sex for dozens of reasons including pity and gratitude. Few women admit to having casual sex for its own sake. They all come up with extraneous narratives to justify the copulation: anything from "I was drunk" to "he was nice to me"

Why this difference between the sexes?

Women dread being labelled a slut. The yarns they proffer render the merely carnal more intimate and, therefore, palatable and socially acceptable.

But there is another reason: body image issues. Even the most drop dead gorgeous woman is somewhat unhappy with her body. This pernicious variant of an inferiority complex and self-devaluation renders women less choosy and leads them to prefer "safe" beta males who are unlikely to reject them: attention from the wrong man is still vastly preferable to no attention whatsoever.

 

Rules of attraction for one night stands

People are either broken and wounded (traumatized) - or healthy and functional. They either have brains, or brawn (beauty), or both, or neither.

The wounded and broken prefer as partners for casual sex "safe" counterparts who are unlikely to reject them: nonthreatening pick ups (no brains and no brawn or beauty). The healthy and functional select mates with brawn or beauty for a single roll in the hay.

People with brains only or brains and brawn or beauty are very unlikely to be chosen as casual sex partners.

Picking up someone highly intelligent is a deterrent: you have to be on your toes, shine, compete, and risk humiliating rejection if you do not measure up. Anxiety, narcissistic injuries, and depletion are often the only rewards.

If you have only brains and zero brawn or beauty, the potential mate has to be a sapiosexual and must be exposed to your cerebral charms over an extended period of time in order to overlook the unappetizing rest of you and consent to have sex.

Chances of that happening in a world of attention deficits, media imagery of bodily perfection, and instant gratification are slim to none. Most nerds and geeks end up being incels: involuntary celibates. They rarely get laid, if ever.

 

Still, "Beta" male losers get laid more often than "alpha" male winners because women frequently select them for casual sex. "Nice guys" are "safe": they do not threaten the woman with any prospect of long-term attachment or relationship, they make few demands, and are pliable and compliant one night sexual and dating partners: someone to have drinks with, chat, and socialize with, fuck for a while, and then discard without giving this disposable man a second thought.

Women are far more likely to have sex on a first date with a beta male than with the socially superior and more accomplished variant.

As women adopt hitherto exclusively male sexual behaviors, mores, and traits, they become more promiscuous. Recent studies have revealed that women have almost as many one night stands as men, for example. Cheating among women in committed relationships also surged dramatically.

 

Research shows that women younger than 40 prefer men with 120 IQ points or fewer to men with 140 IQ points or more. They also find "overconfidence" in men extremely offputting.

This is a major upheaval in gender roles and inter-gender power politics. Only 40 years ago, women still overwhelmingly opted for winners and "jerks", in line with a trend as old and established as humanity itself

Numerous recent studies demonstrate this tectonic shift. As women become way more narcissistic and empowered in multiple ways, they prefer weaker, feminized males both as sexual partners and in romantic dyads.

 

Sexual inflation is when women offer unconditional sex with no strings attached. Such behavioral choice leads to a precipitous decline in committed relationships and a commensurate rise in casual sex.

Throughout the history of our species women traded access to their bodies as vessels of both sexual gratification and childbearing (pregnancy). Men provided, in return, proteins: as nutritional supplements (game meat they had hunted for), as sperm, and packaged in muscles. They guarded their women and children (really enslaved chattel) from incursions by other men.

Typically, men euphemistically relabelled this possessiveness "protection" and the whole unsavory arrangement "marriage". But nowadays as sex is freely and instantly available, men have little incentive to commit. Women are no longer dependent on men for any of the traditional functions.

The foundation of the inter-gender compact have crumbled, gender roles became fluid and fused (unigender), and this frustration led to aggression (radical feminism and the manosphere). Gender vertigo ensued: men and women are exceedingly wary of each other and repeated hurt and abuse perpetrated by both parties is driving most people to opt for an atomized, solitary, self-sufficient existence as a lifestyle choice.

 

The contemporary dating scene is fragmented and baffling. But recent studies help to make sense of it.

Men and women who are in pursuit of casual sex (one to two night stands) find it in bars or parties (60%), pubs, restaurants, resorts, and clubs (another 20%), and dating apps and sites (the remaining 20%). About 30% of users of technology are looking for meaningless, emotionless romps or accomplices to adultery. Many first dates end in sex, but it is not considered casual because it incorporates intimacy and rudimentary emotions.

In the middle tier, men and women have self-limiting (the median is 6 months) love affairs (as playmates, fuck buddies, friends with benefits). They find partners on dating sites and apps but, more frequently, via social media and at work.

Finally, many singles (bachelors, separated, divorced) are looking for life companions within a committed relationship. Friends and family introduce them to potentials, or they join activities, venues, and institutions with like minded people.

Oddly, people keep looking for the wrong kinds of partners in the wrong types of places and this mismatch is the main reason for protracted dating and relationship failures. If you go to a bar to look for the love of your life or to church to pick up a one night stander, you are bound to be bitterly disappointed.

 

In the transactional West, service providers are expected to act with impersonal and non-intrusive courtesy as well as swift efficiency. Any attempt to exceed this remit may land them in court for stalking, sexual or other harassment, or breach of ethics. In the East, a supererogatory personal touch, some implied intimacy, concessionary flexibility, and an ostentatious display of emotions are indispensable to one's professional reputation.

Cultural differences between East and West are surprisingly trenchant and profound, considering the homogenizing effects of mass and social media. They are not limited to business or social intercourse: they permeate even the most intimate realms of conduct.

Consider ubiquitous female promiscuity.

In the West it is driven by petulant immaturity, grandiose entitlement, and the joys of newly discovered emancipation and empowerment.

In the East, women openly hunt for men and are predatory. Promiscuity there is coupled with aggressive manipulation and deception.

Or the concomitant phenomenon of misogyny.

The Western misogynist avoids women altogether or limits his interaction with them to rare casual sex. He hangs out with other misogynists. The Eastern misogynist pays women to be his concubines, sex slaves, and punching bags. He scouts for women eagerly and persistently.

 

This is the "Era of the Stranger": we confide in and sleep with total unknowns, often preferring ersatz passing intimacy to the real, deeper thing

Modern, cheap means of transportation and communication coupled with technologies such as dating apps and social media conspired to erode meaningful, long-term relationships and favor liaisons, flings, and dalliances. Casual sex was made feasible with contraception and women's lib empowerment, especially in higher education and the workplace

Institutions predicated on profound and growing intimacy are doomed. The angst, ennui, and atomized loneliness of modern existence in cahoots with multiple triggers of anxiety and depression undermine any attempt to forge enduring bonds with significant others

Attachments are perceived as threatening: they invariably resolve into hurt. Pain aversion keeps people apart and renders interactions superficial and minimal. Society, community, and family are things of the past. Solidarity is dead. We are left to fend off for ourselves, each to and on his or her own.

 

But is there such a thing as a truly emotionless and meaningless sex?

 

The morning after a torrid one night stand, replete with countless deep French kisses, the man offers his nocturnal partner a tame farewell kiss on the lips. She recoils in horror: "What are you doing? Get away from me!" How to account for this ostensibly irrational behavior?

Signaling.

French kisses during casual sex are a part of the total physical intimacy engendered during the encounter but have no emotional correlate. One night stands essentially amount to using the body of an animate partner - frequently, a stranger - to masturbate with. There are zero feelings, except maybe some generalized tenderness and a fuzzy affection which dissipate the minute the act is over.

In the light of day and out of the purely sexual context, a kiss carries a message, it constitutes a meaningful signal regarding the existence of underlying reciprocated emotional intimacy. It is misleading and coercive, an intrusion on sacred personal space and, therefore, a form of harassment.

Every single human action, gesture, and movement carry multiple, context-dependent semiotic connotates and denotates. Sex is not an exception.

 

Still, all animals practice sex without intimacy or emotions and the human animal is no exception.

So, why the righteous brouhaha about it?

1. Speciesism: Humans are superior to animals and should never give in to their animal nature but rather transcend it. It is a form of grandiosity, fostered originally by religious teachings.

2. Conflating and confusing lust and love, emotional intimacy with physical intimacy. Casual sex amounts to masturbating with the body of a nearly anonymous partner, an animated dildo, a sophisticated and unpredictable sex doll, replete with smells and tastes. It has nothing whatsoever to do with sex in a committed, loving relationship.

3. Being in love with infatuation itself, being addicted to falling in love. Some people "fall in love" with their sexual partners, even after a one night stand. This complicates matters and leads to heartbreak that is best avoided altogether.

The only thing that seriously bothers and worries me about casual sex (and I have had my share) is that it has become the norm, the standard practice ("hookup culture") among those born after 1995.

It may affect their ability to form meaningful intimate relationships (the jury is out on this one). It definitely predisposes the members of these generations to regard sex as nothing more significant than other bodily functions and renders them way more prone to cheating (up dramatically among both genders) and to reckless sexual behaviors also linked to substance abuse.

The preponderance of emotionless sex is the problem - not the act itself.

 

A lot of strife and heartbreak between men and women can be avoided with honest communication of values, expectations, and cultural-societal backgrounds.

 

This need to compare notes is rendered even more urgent by kaleidoscopic gender roles (it is called "gender vertigo").

 

Example:

 

In a recent study, a whopping 10% of British women aged 18-40 said that they are PLANNING to get drunk senseless and bed a total stranger in a one night stand whenever they are in a new city

 

Another 15% said that they are LIKELY to have sex with someone they got acquainted with it for longer than a few hours. A majority of them said that they will not use condoms. About 40% allowed total strangers to ejaculate inside them in a drunk one night stand.

 

So, while such behavior appears to have become normative among women, many men still find it unacceptable and offputting

 

Following a drunk bout of casual sex, most women regret the choice of sexual partner (made attractive via beer goggles). But not one woman involved in such escapades accepted that it was WRONG. These women - a growing hefty minority - nowadays consider such adventures DESIRABLE, not WRONG.

 

Another example:

 

Women completely fail to see the problem if they - while in a relationship - go out alone at night, have drinks with a stranger, talk, socialize, have a good time, slow dance or just dance with him.

 

Put differently: women today regard it as totally acceptable to date (=have a night out alone with) other men - including strangers they have just met - while in a relationship.

 

All women surveyed used the exact phrase: "You have to trust your partner. I am doing nothing wrong."

 

One last example:

 

Many women see nothing wrong or flirtatious in sharing a drink (=drinking from the same glass) with a stranger in a bar or in a restaurant. The commonest response: "It shows curiosity as to the taste of the drink sampled".

 

Many men find all the above behaviors wrong or even dealbreakers. They should communicate this to their partners in advance and strike detailed and mutually accepted behavioral agreements and rules.

 

Casual sex with strangers (one night stands, or stranger sex) sometimes devolves into extreme humiliation and even outright infliction of pain. These outlier experiences could fulfill either of several psychological functions:

1. Experimenting with novelty without the risk of being judged and without caring about the sex partner's opinion. The absence of long-term consequences and future reminders (it is, after all, a one time encounter) encourage sexual daring and openness and result in trying out kink and other forms of "deviant or perverted" sex.

2. (Applies to women only) By picking an inferior or lowlife partner and then allowing him to use her body with no constraining rules or boundaries, women self-trash, self-punish, self depreciate, self destruct, and uphold their self-perception as a "bad, unworthy, dumb, defiled slut". Where there is a rejecting and abusive intimate partner in the picture, it is also a way to "devalue his property" by rendering herself a "whore"

3. Restoring one's self-esteem via the other's out of control, bestial desire: the more extreme the sex acts, the more carnally irresistible the violated or raped or humiliated party feels.

4. Sex with unknown and, therefore, potentially dangerous partners is - oddly! - palliative: the fight, freeze, fawn, or fight response required to survive the night distracts from and ameliorates overwhelming and dysregulated negative emotions, such as depression, disappointment, and anger.

 

Men choose a casual sexual partner based on one of three parameters (opportunity, availability, visual cues). Women go through a whopping 39 criteria before they agree to copulate.

This is why women may end up having one night stands even with ugly junkie bum losers: they "saw something in him" (read: he passed some of the 39 tests). Women's sexuality is plastic: a woman will have sex with a man she pities or out of gratitude or because he is intelligent, funny, kind, interesting, attentive, finds her irresistible, pleasant to be around ... the list is 39 items long.

Similarly, the mating (mate selection) algorithm is different between men and women. Men first feel carnally attracted and are then driven to act on their lust. Women's bodies react exactly as men's do: blood flows to all the right places. But they consciously experience arousal only AFTER they have decided to sleep with the man (in other words: after he had been vetted by passing some of the 39 exams)

Different evolutionary paths account for this disparateness: Nature encourages men to be promiscuous and women to think twice. Reproductive strategies reflect the anticipated investment of scarce resources: even in post-modern societies, women are the ones who get stuck with the bill: pregnancy and childrearing.

 

People tend to mate or copulate with partners who are more or less equal to them in every way - or physically superior. Members of the manosphere misuse the term "hypergamy" to refer to the latter preference.

Less known is the fact that, with the exception of a precious few self-styled "sapiosexuals", the vast majority of people assiduously avoid potential mates with an IQ considerably higher than theirs. They are positively turned off and intimidated by such a discrepancy.

These preferences have to do with psychological defenses aimed at preventing narcissistic injuries (humiliation arising from conspicuous inferiority) and preserving the integrity and functioning of the ego or the self. Envy and competition are also involved in such avoidance.

Finally: people feel elevated and elated when they have a relationship, however cursory, with physically superior partners. They attribute the mate selection to their own attractive personality or style.

But everyone feel exploited, hypervigilant, paranoid, anxious, and vaguely menaced when they team up with their intellectual superiors. People wonder why they were chosen: what is in it for the more intelligent counterpart. They become suspicious of ulterior motives and a hidden agenda. They anticipate abandonment and loss sooner ir later, when their inferior faculties are exposed.

 

How to tell apart a one night stand with a stranger from a first date that ends with sex?

1. Casual sex is focused on the act and takes place after a brief chance encounter in a bar, pub, restaurant, club, dating app or site, a party.

Dating is more involved and time consuming: it requires coordination, spending time together, getting to know each other, and engaging in other activities, such as attending an event, dancing, or socializing.

2. Partners to a one night stand are selected mostly based on their looks or physical attractiveness, often fuelled by alcohol ("beer goggles"). Personality matters only in date sex. In casual sex people end up in bed because they turn each other on. In dating, they end up having sex because they fascinate or like each other or for some other emotional or transactional reason ("owing" the other, for example).

 

3. One night stands may result in one more encounter, but rarely lead to a relationship. Dating sex morphs into more much more often.

4. Casual sex evokes instant diffuse, weak, consistent, body-focused, and stable emotionality: gratification relaxation, comfort, a general "feel good" fuzzy factor. There is no psychological intimacy, just the physical kind.

Emotions and intimacy in dating start low. They are hesitant and diffuse in the first few minutes. They coalesce, focus, become clearer, and intensify with hours spent together to the point of communicating positive feelings - anything from gratitude to affinity to infatuation - via sex.

5. One night stands with strangers are unambiguous: the acquaintance with the partner is so brief, cursory, superficial, and forgettable that it borders on anonymity.

Date sex comes after getting to know the partner substantively over hours of talking and interacting with him or her in various settings and sometimes with other people. The acquaintance is much deeper and consequently the sex is less perfunctory or emotionless.

6. Finally, in casual sex, the transition from hanging out together to full-fledged sex is abrupt and transactional: the parties waste little time on banter and are focused on the gratification.

In dating, courting and signalling precede the sexual act, which is a culmination of fondness and intimacy, however minimal.

 

When travelling alone in a foreign place, people resort to either of two default behaviors - or to both of them, alternating:

MCDONALD EFFECT

Finding themselves in unfamiliar territory, people default to old, well-established, true and tested patterns of behavior, choices, and brands. This is exactly the allure of the likes of McDonald: home away from home.

So: if you pub crawl, visit museums, or sample gourmet food at home - you may end up doing the same in Rome.

ROMAN HOLIDAY

But as often, being away from home also means freedom from prying eyes, prurient neighbors, peer pressure, and social control. It legimitizes a side of you that is inhibited or suppressed: drinking, promiscuity, having a fling, cheating, antisocial or petty criminal behavior, aggression, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, adventurousness, shopaholism, recklessness, gambling, or any number of frowned upon behaviors.

 

MAN

Why did you cheat on me with someone so vastly inferior to me? He is ugly, penniless, paranoid, junkie, drunk, unemployed, indolent, and, generally, a beta loser

WOMAN

Because he gave me what you wouldn't, never mind how much I begged you to.

He flooded me with attention, affection, support, succor, and passionate desire. He wanted me in every way. He gave me hours of listening and handholding and the intimacy of inside jokes and of dancing and socializing and doing small inconsequential things together.

He was far superior to you in every way that mattered. He did not abuse me. I lit up his world and his face every time he saw me.

MAN

He wanted you only in one way and solely for one thing and you know it!

He was FAKING all the rest and not very well, if I may add.

WOMAN

True, he was - and, of course I knew it, I am not dumb or gullible.

But, you see, the very fact that he had bothered to fake it, that he had invested so much into making me believe his lies - this very exertion flattered me and proved to me that he cared about having me.

After the years of zero emotions with you, of taking me for granted - even these breadcrumbs of attention and effort and time and lust overwhelmed me with gratitude and elicited in me the wish to reciprocate, to show him in every way how much I appreciate it - and him. So, I did. I gave him all of me, my body first and foremost.

As opposed to you, he toiled hard for it and at the end of every evening, he had earned it, this prize that was me.

And it didn't really matter how much IQ or money he had or how far he got in life or how many of his teeth were missing or whether he looked like a roadkill

The only thing that meant something to me was to glimpse myself through his adoring, desirous eyes, to gauge my reflection and to be able to find myself as lovable and as wanted as you have never made me feel. I did not want him, really, but I wanted him to want me, because it made me come alive, finally.

 

The Aftermath

 

Here is a syllogism for you: (1) All sex is physically intimate; (2) Some sex is emotionless and meaningless; hence (3) All emotionless and meaningless sex is intimate, at least corporeally. In other words: intimacy is not connected necessarily to emotions and meaning. The context is crucial.

Intimacy is the removal of psychological defenses and physical barriers in order to grant access to one's body or mind. If so, an appointment with your gynecologist or psychotherapist is intimate; but rarely involves reciprocated emotions or is a part of a meaningful relationship. Still: exposing your genitalia to be probed and sharing your innermost secrets and thoughts are, no doubt, intimate acts.

 

"It was meaningless sex, she (or he) meant nothing to me!" is the stock response of cheating men (and, increasingly, women). I always found this odd reassurance odiously offensive. It only makes matters worse and hurts even more.

To start with it is never true: there is no such animal as "meaningless" sex. Sex - even the casual sort with a virtual stranger - always has some intimate and emotional psychosexual background. There is mutual affection exchanged, gratitude expressed, self-esteem buttressed, pity or protectiveness felt, attraction articulated, smells and tastes enjoyed, support given, exuberance, possessiveness, and, often, hopes and expectations aroused.

But, far more importantly: if he or she really meant nothing to you and the sex was that irrelevant - why risk devastating your significant other for no value? Surely, the happiness and wellbeing of your intimate life partner matter more than an orgasm with a nonentity? Or do they?

 

To recap:

 

When caught cheating, two stock phrases many adulterers use are: "s/he meant nothing to me, it was meaningless sex" and "I will never see him or her again." Both feeble - and infuriating - attempts at amelioration backfire.

Here is what you should say to the cheater just before you dump him - the only reasonable and justified course of action:

If the sex meant nothing to you - then your partner's feelings must have meant less than nothing. Why risk hurting the person that you purport to love and care about just to do something that means nothing to you with someone who means nothing to you?

As to "I will never see him or her again" - of course you won't! You got everything you wanted from your one night accomplice, mission accomplished, why see him or her again in any case? The other party is usually equally eager to avoid all further contract. So, there is no big sacrifice involved in making such a solemn pledge. It is simply a statement of fact.

The only rational thing to do is quit the relationship instantly. "Once a cheater, always a cheater" is supported by reams of studies and mountains of research as is the lesser known truth: "Once cheated on, always cheated on" and "if they cheat with you, they will cheat on you". Bail out. Break up. Preserve your sanity. No habitual cheater is worth your self-deception - and every cheater cheats again, given the opportunity.

Women get drunk or high and place themselves in reckless, compromising and dangerous situations with men they hardly know - or with men they know only too well. Some women flirt aggressively or make out egregiously, seductively, and invitingly with no intention to follow through to full-fledged sex. Ineluctably, many of these women end up being sexually assaulted or even raped by unscrupulous, predatory men.

Nonconsensual sex is a crime and should always be punished harshly.

But falsely promising sex by word or by abundance of unequivocal actions should be equally criminalized as a form of fraudulent misconduct.

Men should be able to recover costs and damages from these "playful" counterparties, including for distress and hurt feelings.

Promises - made verbally or behaviorally - are binding and should be kept: look up promissory estoppel and breach of promise (mainly in marriage). Leading on and misrepresentation should be a crime not only in business and should have adverse actionable and tort or public reputation consequences and not only in politics.

"I will never meet him again!" Every rape counsillor can confirm that this is the standard "punishment" meted out to the perpetrators by female victims of rape, sexual assault, or other forms of coercive, non-consensual sex. "That's it! He will never see me again!" But how is this "threat" a punishment? It is laughable! It implies that the culprit WANTS to reunite with his prey. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

As Lidija Rangelovska observes, it is a grandiose attempt by the victim to restore her shattered self-esteem and sense of control. Victims react to all manner of trauma with narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors and traits ("overlay").

The perpetrator got everything that he wanted - sex!!! The victim has nothing more to offer him that he wants. In the wake of the crime, his only fervent desire is to never again lay eyes on the woman! "We will never be together again" is, therefore, not a penalty - but a granted wish, a reward. The molester is counting on the victim's avoidance and silence to evade all accountability and the consequences of his misdeeds.

 

In a professional, corporate, or business setting, there is a paucity of personal information regarding:

1. The backgrounds of everyone present or involved;

2. Their common or past history;

3. Mental health issues, traits, or behaviors (a fragile self-esteem, promiscuity, borderline, psychopathic, histrionic, or narcissistic);

4. How competitive or vindictive they are;

5. Emotions or attachments (overt and undeclared); and

6. The exact nature of the relationships between everyone present.

If you pick up or hit on someone you have just met in a project, at work, in a business setting, a colleague, or a collaborator, you may end up being unwittingly used as an instrument to settle accounts or some other private destructive agenda.

This is why dating and sex are best attempted only outside the workplace or the collaborative project.

Even an innocent assignation between colleagues, service providers, guests, or collaborators - let alone ending up having casual sex - can lead to major disruptive tensions.

Mixing sex with work is frowned upon in most business environments and those who flout this separation or defy it (often in conjunction with substance abuse) acquire a bad reputation and are shunned.

Thinking with your crotch is a veritably bad idea, but never more so than as an employee, service provider, or contractor while employed.

The young are avoiding each other in every possible way.

Spectatoring: worrying about how you look and sound while having sex.

It is the outcome of consumption of porn and growing shame and inhibition related to nudity and body dysmorphia.

Instead: sexting which can be staged and photoshopped is the rage as well as dating apps as entertainment and diversion from real face to face encounters.

 

Kink and BDSM

 

Good conventional sex leads to a climax via BEING. You feel every nerve and cell in your body come alive and die in ecstasy.

With an experienced partner, a veteran dom (=dominant), BDSM (bondage and sadomasochistic) sex is about experiencing orgasm via NOT being.

The dom takes away your will, your inhibitions, your boundaries and your separate existence. You are utterly objectified. You surrender completely, irreparably defeated. This act of vanishing, merger, and fusion is the climax.

 

Cheating, Adultery, Extramarital Sex

 

When your best friend takes your new car for a spin with your permission - you do not feel slighted, hurt, offended, or that your car had been devalued or depreciated in any way.

But if s/he were to sleep with your spouse, even with your consent, you would instantly come to regard your intimate partner henceforth as "damaged goods".

Why the starkly disparate emotional reactions?

The car does not reciprocate, share, or feel anything. As opposed to most spouses, it is not conscious or sentient.

But what if the sex was utterly mechanical and therefore meaningless?

There is no such thing as "meaningless" sex. All sexual acts are intimate to a degree. By undressing and sleeping with your friend, your spouse had instantly created and shared with your friend a set of exclusive moments to which you are not privy and which you would never share. You are denied access to a time in your spouse's life which is unique to her and to her lover. It is an act of exclusion. It involves emotions, however basic.

But surely your spouse has had such moments with others before you had met?

True. But once you had teamed up, you had agreed, explicitly or implicitly, that all intimate moments will be exclusively shared by both of you and only by both of you. Granting access to your bodies reifies precisely such moments of exclusive mutuality, a declaration of the special place you have in each others's lives. Sleeping with someone else is a breach of this compact even when the whole event is orchestrated, impersonal, unsatisfying, and consensual.

 

Other forms of intimacy with another also constitute a violation of the bond even if they do not end in bed. Some people regard an evening spent talking as more intimate than even sex: a candlelit dinner, the sharing of confidences, a nightlong bar crawl, a holiday, or a good time, fun evening spent together.

Why does exclusivity matters in a romantic intimate relationship?

Because it safeguards against instability, external shocks, threats, hurt, and abandonment. It guarantees the longevity of the union, thus encouraging and fostering commitment and investment in the bonded dyad.

 

Imagine the following two scenarios:

1. Your wife returns home at 5 AM and tells you that she ran across her colleague in an afterwork bar. They spent the entire night talking and reminiscing, but nothing inappropriate and sexual happened. It was such heartwarming fun that they decided to meet again from time to time: she even intends to bring him home and introduce him to you.

2. The octogenarian widowed neighbor from upstairs dropped by while you were away. He was so lonely, depressed, and heartbroken that your wife let him fondle her breasts and touch her genitalia in order to lift his spirits (if nothing else besides)

Strangely, the first scenario is likely to render you far more jealous than the second one. It is because romantic jealousy is not about sex at all. It is about intimacy and it is a form of extreme anxiety about anticipated loss, rejection, and abandonment. The risk of losing your wife to the animated corpse from the floor above is zilch - but her colleague can definitely make a move on her and the way she had already reacted to his company indicates that he stands a chance of breaking up your marriage.

 

If your intimate partner or spouse is uttering ANY of these sentences, s/he is about to cheat on you and s/he knows that it is almost certainly going to happen:

No need for abandonment anxiety

These are just your insecurities

You are being insanely jealous/paranoid

I am just going for a drink with him/her

You should trust me/don't you trust me?

He is like a brother (she is family) to me

We are going to just discuss work

Actually, I don't find him/her attractive/interesting

I didn't know he/she is going to be there

I will be back before you know it

I just need some personal space and time

S/he wants to discuss something highly personal with me, so it is better if we are alone

I will never cheat on you

Feel free to add your own "pearls" of protestations of innocence and faux or guilt-driven displays of goodwill.

 

There are 4 variants of the pandemic of emotional or physical cheating: 1. Ostentatious-malicious (intended to triangulate or hurt the cheater's intimate partner); 2. Deceptive (most common); 3. Functional (pressure valve to alleviate stress, palliate, or meet needs, usually in a "don't ask, don't tell" permissive agreement with the partner); and 4. Open-contractual (as in open relationship or marriage) – see below.

Recent studies show that half of all cheaters are happy in their marriages and love their partners. The most common reason for straying given by women was: inequality of burden-sharing (not falling out of love, unmet needs, or boredom!). Two-timing had become a psychopathic (antisocial) impulsive mode of protest and subversion of traditional gender roles. It levels the playing field, fostering unigender and gender vertigo.

Themselves children of divorce, young people are disinclined to separate. Why bother? The next intimate partner is bound to be as bad (or as good) as the current one. Cheating is a narcissistic plan B: have the marital cake and eat the forbidden fruit too. Deception, dysempathy, disintimacy, and blind egotism are now widely perceived as positive and self-efficacious adaptations with beneficial outcomes.

Over the past 300 years, we have revamped our behaviors and values, doubled our life expectancy (which rendered monogamy and a partnership for life impractical), and revolutionized our communications and transportation technologies. Our millennia-old institutions, though, have barely changed to accommodate these tectonic shifts. Anomie, atomization, alienation, irrationality, rampant mental illness, multiple dysfunctionality, mob rule, and rabid narcissism are the costs of this failure to reform.

People also often confuse humiliation (narcissistic mortification) with romantic jealousy. Being cheated on undermines one's sense of safety and creates disorientation, confusion, and minacious insecurity. Infantile regression triggers infantile defenses, extreme neediness, entitlement, petulance, and a passive-aggressive wish to destroy the frustrating and hurtful object. But all these have nothing to do with romantic jealousy. In other words: it is possible to be devastated but your wife's cheating and still not feel romantically jealous or possessive at all.

 

Alcoholics in rehab avoid all alcoholic drinks, never mind how small. Some men - with mental issues or sexual proclivities - keep selecting promiscuous, dissolute, unboundaried, dysregulated, labile, unfaithful, good-digging, and deceptive women as mates.

 

These men are so terrified of their own self-destructive choices that they end up shunning women altogether, in long periods of self-enforced celibacy and emotional and sexual abstinence which can sometimes last decades.

 

The women that turn you on are bad for your health - goes the flashing mental alert - They could be life threatening or at the very least adversely affect your health, go after your wealth, and compromise your wellbeing. Stay away from women altogether because you tend to choose disastrously wrong women consistently. You are not well.

 

So, exactly like the alcoholic who avoids any type of drink, at any time, anywhere and under any circumstances in order to remain both sober and alive - these men eschew any interaction with any woman whatsoever. Better safe than sorry, or traumatized to the core, or dead.

 

There is a tectonic shift in mate selection preferences among humans. As women become more independent, grandiose, and entitled, they adopt behaviors hitherto associated exclusively with psychopathic men. They also opt for "beta" males (weak, tame, dependent, underaccomplished, less intelligent and less handsome) as sexual and romantic partners.

This is accompanied by a revolution in sexual and behavioral signalling as the semantics and semiotics of types of social conduct are reversed for the first time since the inception of the agricultural revolution and urbanization, thousands of years ago. No wonder feelings of dislocation and disorientation regarding gender roles (gender vertigo) are so high and rampant.

Drinking, smoking, the loud use of profane language, defiance, promiscuity, novelty and thrill seeking, avoidant attachment, impulsiveness, masculine attire and body, little makeup or grooming, overt seductiveness and flirtatiousness, abuse of multiple substances, recklessness, loss of control in public, impetuousness, and frequent changes of partners in interpersonal relationships were considered until the 1960s negative hallmarks of a mentally disturbed or desperate "bad news" woman best avoided.

Today, these very same character traits and behaviors render a woman MORE attractive because they indicate to men her sexual availability, personal autonomy, emancipated mindset, strength, financial wherewithal, absence of demanding neediness or long-term expectations, and fun loving ambience.

In this hookup age of ubiquitous antisocial or asocial narcissism and atomization (schizoid loneliness as a way of life), such women are treasured and courted assiduously by emasculated men, usually for the casual sex and noncommittal non-relationships that have come to typify our dystopian, post-modern, thanatic, materialistic world.

 

It is amazing to observe how women sense a real man even if he looks like a much rehashed roadkill or yesterday’s unsorted trash.

If a man loves and adores women and finds their company and sex irresistible - he can do anything he wants with them and to them.

Women find the idea of being irresistible - irresistible!

That’s why some women enjoy being touched even inappropriately: it proves to them that they are irresistible.

And that is also why many women have RAPE fantasies: because in such phantasmagorias, the male perpetrator finds them irresistible, cannot stop himself.

But this is true solely on one crucial condition:

That the man finds the woman irresistible in all her dimensions: looks, personality, her company, sense of humor, intelligence, personal history - as well as sexuality.

If the man finds the woman irresistible ONLY as a SEX OBJECT, to be used to grope, poke, and masturbate with - it is a major turn off for the woman and she finds such a man revolting and to be avoided. His actions are then perceived as sexual harassment and worse.

Studies have consistently demonstrated that both men and women often - though by no means always! - cheat on their primary partners with far inferior lovers or mistresses: uglier, or older, less intelligent, unattractive, or less accomplished. Why would anyone trade down? When the sexual or emotional affairs are exposed, the cheated spouses are aghast at their unintelligibly poor replacements: they feel humiliated and narcissistically injured.

But, actually, such choices of "safe" stand-ins signal an abiding and deep commitment to the relationship with the deceived significant other.

In a relationship that had become emotionless and sexless, the partners have an irresistible urge to satisfy their needs for affection, succor, and intimacy, sometimes including closeness of the physical sort, when they miss being wanted and desired both as companions and as sexual objects.

But, if the strayers still value the primary relationship for whatever reason or if they still hold hope for it, they would attempt to avoid an alternative liaison with a potentially serious substitute. They want to not form a new, competing, and equipotent attachment. It is easier to give up on an inferior stopgap romantic counterparty. They want to stray - but never lose sight of the safe and secure base of home.

Only when they have given up all expectations within the morbid primary bond, do they seek other partners with superior qualities. Such choice is the tintinnabulating death knell of the old, now irredeemably defunct love.

 

People are emotionally or sexually unfaithful to their partner for dozens of unrelated reasons. Often an affair is merely an attempt at self-exploration. But in some cases, cheating - whether a love liaison or a one night stand - is the only way to transition out of an addictive relationship founded on trauma bonding or even mere pity. Even if the partner is not aware of the transgression, the offending party is and it is often enough to bring about the separation.

Intimacy with a third party is empowering: it restores the cheater's self-esteem and confidence, makes him or her feel desirable, less tolerant of the absence, rejection, and maltreatment meted out by the spouse or mate. Having alternatives does wonders to one's sense of personal autonomy and self-efficacious agency.

Being loved by an outsider - even if only briefly and physically - proves to the straying party that s/he deserves better. It is also, of course, a way to sever the emotional bonding conferred by exclusivity, to disinvest in and divest from the failed dyad (decathect)

Sometimes, desperate to eject, cheaters self-trash recklessly with highly inappropriate partners and in insalubrious circumstances in order to render themselves "damaged goods" and make it easier for their partners to give up on them.

With narcissistic, borderline, and psychopathic cheaters, the act buttresses injured grandiosity: the hidden and forbidden makes them feel special and superior as well as righteously vengeful and omnipotent.

 

When intimate partners cheat on each other, they ease their conscience and allay their guilt and shame via a "deceitful confession": coming clean about certain facts and circumstances while altering, minimizing, or denying outright the more egregious misconduct, the core of the transgression.

The aim is utterly selfish: to unburden the offender but without hurting his significant other with exclamation like "what s/he doesn't know won't hurt her/him" or "what happened there, stayed there, it was totally meaningless and I will never see this person again"

Examples of deceitful confessions:

I just (danced with him, kissed her), but it stopped there, I got hold of myself, nothing else happened

We got drunk, so we slept overnight in a hotel room, that's all.

I spent the night at his apartment, but he is an old friend, like a brother to me.

I stumbled and fell all over her, so we started talking and we have common friends. I am meeting her to have a quick bite.

Deceitful confessions make matters worse. They only amplify the emotional damage made to the intimate partner and the wreckage in the relationship.

Why engage in acts that are evidently massively injurious to someone you claim to care about and love - if these misdeeds are so meaningless to you and so casual that they can be glossed over so effortlessly? If the sex with another person was so forgettable, why not forget about it to start with?

But of course in an age of ubiquitous narcissism and psychopathy, self-gratification trumps impulse control and one's needs, however trivial, invariably take precedence over another's wellbeing, however profound.

 

There are four categories of cheating on an intimate partner:

1. Deceitful: run of the mill surreptitious unfaithfulness intended to compensate for lacks in the adulterer's primary relationship or life and expressive of deficient coping strategies, self-inefficacy, and deepset character flaws;

2. Ostentatious: intended to triangulate with a third party, elicit jealousy, and, ironically, provoke the complacent and indifferent partner into resuscitating the relationship;

3. Projective: intended to end the relationship by forcing the wronged intimate partner into the villain's role, rendering him or her paranoid, aggressive, and controlling. Dumping the partner then becomes both easier and justified. Such affairs or one night stands usually involve the shocking, out of the blue, and scorchingly humiliating public misconduct of the perpetrator;

4. Bridge: intended to sever the emotional bonds, burn all the bridges back to the dysfunctional relationship, breach all the verbal and unspoken understandings underlying the dyad, and propel the disloyal traitorous partner to move on to greener pastures.

 

Does he accuse you of cheating on him all the time? There could be three reasons for his abuse: two of them malignant and one benign.

1. He may be projecting. Actually, he is the one who is cheating or considering to cheat. He assumes that you are in the throes of the same state of mind as he is.

2. He wants to legitimize his adultery or two-timing. If you are cheating - why can't he? And, if you started it, he still maintains the high moral ground, regardless of his peccadillos.

3. He wants to initiate a dialog on opening up the relationship and granting both of you the freedom to be with others, sexually. He just doesn't know how to do it, he feels awkward, he is afraid to hurt you - so he immaturely aggresses.

 

Cheating often inexorably follows intimacy. The vast majority of women would refuse to French kiss a man they have just met. The same women would not hesitate to kiss and be groped by a celebrity. Trump is absolutely right for once.

This is because the celebrity is not a stranger. His life is an open book, few secrets, a weird type of public intimacy. People know more about the private lives of celebrities than they know about their neighbors or even family members.

 

First time transgressions - cheating on your spouse, doing drugs - involve emotional preparedness (being bored or frustrated, possessing a low arousal or low boredom threshold in psychopaths, for example)+disinhibition (overcoming guilt and shame owing to peer pressure or example, environment, alcohol or other factors)+loss of impulse control+a cognitive choice ("go for it or go get it"). 😉

The second time is different: it becomes a habit, with practiced moves. Habituation often leads to addiction, a form of compulsion. A confluence of physiological and psychological factors conspire to render the newly formed behavior a pattern: the thrill of the illicit or the dangerously risky and reckless, self-destructiveness or masochism, affirmation of oneself as a bad, unworthy object, and, of course, the bodily effects of such actions.

There are two types of habit: intensive and extensive. Intensive habits - like smoking or binging on food or libation - cater to and satisfy a limited array of needs and cravings, predilections and proclivities, pathologies and wishes. They are easier to dispense with.

But extensive habits - like cheating or antisocial conduct - are very difficult to get rid of because they gratify and reflect the totality of the personality, its quirks, and idiosyncrasies. The serial adulterer brings into play every aspect and dimension of who she is. Only a miracle will slow her down. Same goes for the drug addict or the pathological gambler or the alcoholic.

 

Let's clear up some misconceptions before we start to explore the terrain: If the members of the couple are having sex ONLY with others - it is not an open marriage or an open relationship, but legitimized cheating. One of the partners is usually codependent and gives in to the other's blackmail. Such an "open" relationship is about clinging, control, and the inter-couple power matrix.

In swinging, if one of the parties is passive and just observes his partner having sex with others, s/he is a cuckquean or a cuckold, not a Lifestyle swinger. Swinging requires the full participation and interaction of everyone. Spouse swapping is a form of swinging that involves cuckoldry.

If the parties lie and deceive each other about their whereabouts and activities, they are being unfaithful. Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) means: no questions asked, no lies told.

 

I advise all my female clients who find themselves in SEXLESS relationships to make medical tests for sexually transmitted diseases and infections and to carry the results with them to show to potential sexual partners.

Additionally, in sexless unions, the chances that your partner is having unprotected sex with third parties is higher than normal. If you do end up making love to him or her, such tests are a very good idea: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

You never know when the opportunity may arise to share the results with an interested male party.

My philosophy is that every woman has a RIGHT to regular lovemaking.

Sex is truly crucial to a woman's mental and physiological health and denying it to her amounts to debilitating ABUSE.

A woman who is denied sex with her primary partner has the perfect moral (and, in most religions, also religious) right to secure her needs outside the relationship.

She owes it to herself to make sure that she has who to have sex with or to secure sex whenever she can (of course, only with partners she finds attractive and compatible). Sex is not a luxury. It is like breathing, eating, and drinking: essential not only to the woman's wellbeing, but also for her health and survival.

The best, of course, is to avoid deception and agree to allow each other to have other sex partners in an open marriage, open relationship and with a Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

 

When a man is cheated on by one woman, he feels cheated on by all women.

A cheating woman is unlike a cheating man: the woman invites her sex partner in, welcomes him warmly, serves him her unique drink, and guards his liquid manhood in herself. She is a host, he is a guest

Even in casual sex, the woman gives her essence, from inside. Even a one night stand implies intimacy, closeness, naked vulnerability, and total trust between the woman and her lover. It is a devastating blow to the cheated man from which he never fully recovers.

 

I regard sex by women and men as fundamentally different experiences. "Penetration" is an aggressive male chauvinistic word that refers to the woman as a territory to be probed, invaded, and conquered. Men are as much engulfed and "digested" by women as they pierce them.

With the single exception of rape, the woman has to invite her sex partner in, welcome him warmly, bathe him in her unique libation, and guard his liquid manhood in herself. She is a host, he is a guest in her shrine.

Even in casual sex, the woman gives access to her essence, from the inside. Even a one night stand implies a modicum of intimacy, closeness, naked vulnerability, and total trust between the woman and her sex partner. At least as much friendly confidence as between a hostess and her guest who she invites to the most shielded private recesses of her home.

This is why cheating by his female intimate partner is such a disproportionately devastating blow to the cheated heterosexual man from which he never fully recovers. Women are far less impacted by the sexual-physical aspects of their partner's infidelity precisely because the anatomy is different: when a woman gives consent it is more pronounced, explicit, proactive, significant, and, well ... deeper.

 

When a woman cheats on an intimate partner, it is typically because she feels unfathomably lonely & miserable owing to egregiously unmet emotional & sexual needs. She is unseen, transparent to her mate. Frequently, she also abused routinely, at least verbally.

The cheating act - especially if it is a one night affair - provides distraction, but, more importantly, a restorative male gaze: the other man proffers the attention, empathy, support, a modicum of intimacy, & lust so sorely lacking in the primary connection. Less commonly it is an act of triangulation intended to hurt the primary partner or elicit a reaction from him (being noticed by him, jealousy)

Women who end up having sex outside the couple sometimes do so because they feel grateful to the new entrant: they may believe that giving their sex is part of the implicit deal struck when they have agreed to date him, that they had led the man on. They may also fear rape if they are perceived as mere teases. There is also a sense of liberating adventure, novelty, & the allure of the forbidden. And having sex helps to revive the woman's flagging self-esteem & awaken her battered femininity.

Having sex with another man usually makes it easier to break up with an abuser or an incompatible partner: it severs the powerful bonds of consensual exclusive attachment.

Some women prepare themselves rather reluctantly for the ineluctable sexual denouement by drinking or getting high. Psychoactive substances reduce inhibitions ("I don't care anymore"), render an even unattractive man irresistible (beer goggles), provide an excuse for misbehavior between the sheets, & engender growing closeness between the drinking or smoking buddies as time passes.

Still, in the majority of cases of straying, women seek only companionship. That many of these events end in actual copulation has little to do with female choice: it demonstrates the ubiquity of sexual assault in the compromising circumstances & situations that many women create with their unwise - desperate, defiant, or impulsive - decisions.

 

Histrionic-narcissistic women maintain a stable of men from their past: ex and wannabe lovers now friendzoned and spiderweb-wrapped until they are needed.

When the histrionic goes through a rough patch or a breakup in her primary relationship with an intimate partner, she reaches out to these hapless white knights to rescue her and to afford much needed succor, mostly emotional and rarely also sexual.

Thus reactivated and reanimated, these men serve to restore and boost the histrionic's flagging self-esteem as well as echo and affirm her self-justifying, self-righteous, self-serving, and alloplastic victimhood narratives.

Friendzoning is a cruel manipulative technique. It holds out the false hope of more - sex or a romantic relationship - while extracting from the target an endless stream of benefits.

The histrionic-narcissistic "queen" or "princess" spends time with her courtiers, shares with them intimate details of her dalliances with other men, and consumes their resources, fully aware of the excruciating hurt this causes them. Their pining pain and frustrated yearning constitute her narcissistic supply.

She maintain them in her orbit by throwing them morsels of one night non-penetrative sex and faux romance. This keeps them on their toes and coming back for more, Pavlovian wretches, always on the lookout for the big break when she will finally relent, realize that they could be so much more than mere "brothers", and embark on a full-fledged love affair with them.

 

If she cheated on you once, she is likely to do it again (serial cheating). If he takes actions (not just talk) to triangulate with another person, he will probably end up double-timing with her or with someone else soon thereafter. If you fell victim to infidelity once, it will happen to you again and with multiple partners. Facts.

This is because adultery is the outcome of selecting for wrong mates repeatedly, mismanaging relationships similarly, and mishandling by the cheater of his or her inexorable dysregulated emotions and moods. Straying is a cry for help, a sign of debilitating distress, and the dead canary in the relationship's deepest mine shafts.

Pain aversion leads to self-deception. The injured party often has access to all the relevant information, the bulk of which is provided by the guilt-ridden and shamefaced fornicator. But denial and reframing set in to twist the facts into a palatable, non-injurious tale of innocence, innocuousness, and happenstance. Narcissistic defenses - such as invulnerability and grandiosity - kick in to mask the betrayal.

 

Fully 91% of both men and women equate sexual exclusivity in a committed relationship with dating exclusivity: no dating others, no sex acts with others.

As usual, narcissists and psychopaths enforce a one-sided deal: they provide no commitment or exclusivity and expect both in return. They lead double and triple lives and, within the couple, absent themselves and withhold affection and sex.

As Lidija Rangelovska observed: the rise of narcissism among men led to a corresponding surge of similar traits and misbehaviors among women in their attempt to adapt to the new environment and cope with it.

Misconduct typical of Borderline (indistinguishable from CPTSD), Histrionic, and Narcissistic personality disorders has exploded among women. Witness, for example, the tripling of adultery rates and quadrupling of casual sex encounters among women of all age groups since the 1970s as well as the tidal wave of female defiant and antisocial (psychopathic) incidents.

Women are adopting hitherto exclusive narcissistic and psychopathic male mores and behaviors. They are emulating "bad guys" rather than "nice guys" because they feel imminently threatened and heartbroken. It is a narcissistic-psychopathic jungle out there, so better be predator than prey.

We - of both sexes and all genders - have completed the transition from a world of praying to a reality of preying.

Is it possible to cheat on a cuckold (a man who gets off on watching his woman make out or copulate with other men)?  

Of course it is.  

When the cuckold is not informed of his partner's dalliance with another man, or when, having been informed, he withholds his consent - anything his partner does amounts to cheating.

Many cuckolds insist on being present during the sex, actively participating in it, "directing" the scene, placing strict boundaries on permissible behaviors, and controlling a lot of what goes on.

There is no cheating only if the partner's sex with others elicits positive emotions all around and overall (a little jealousy is inevitable), when the act is negotiated and agreed to well in advance, is voluntary on both sides, and not presented as a shocking and humiliating fait accompli.

Cheating involves the heartbreaking and disorientating loss of trust owing to deception and betrayal. The cheated party also mourns the intimacy his partner seemed to have found with another. None of these happen in a well-regulated lifestyle of swinging and cuckoldry.

When should you forgive your cheating partner and give the relationship, such as it is, a second chance? It depends on the answers to three questions. This is the male perspective, but it applies to the other side as well: just change the personal pronouns.

1. Why did she cheat? Was it NOT in order to satisfy unmet emotional needs but merely because of a penchant for novelty and risk taking? Did she feel compelled to have sex with the other party (out of fear, or gratitude, or pity, or pressure, or building expectations)? Did she lead him on, did all the flirting? Was she drunk or high? Did she initiate the sex? Did she place herself squarely in compromising circumstances bound to lead to sexual assault or voluntary lovemaking? Did she mean to hurt you, take revenge, or provoke your jealousy (triangulate)? Was there malice involved: rage, defiance, and disappointment? If the answer is "yes" to ANY of these questions, walk away, the relationship is hopelessly doomed: the betrayal will happen again.

2. Was sex the ineluctable outcome of her choices, decisions, and behaviors? Could she reasonably have expected the situation to deteriorate or become risky and end in copulation? Accepting the possibility of eventual sex is the same like choosing to have sex. Say goodbye to such a partner.

3. Most importantly: did she replace you with him even for one night? Were they emotionally intimate, hugged, kissed, touched, danced, socialized, spent quality time together, had fun, talked endlessly, laughed at each other's jokes ... In short: was he her new full-fledged intimate partner, no matter how transiently? If so, quit. It is one thing to merely have sex - it is another issue altogether to find a "rescuer", dump you emotionally, transfer her allegiance and commitment to him, badmouth you, betray your secrets, and find in the new Man the comfort, affection, friendship, warmth, and intimacy that she feels that she lacks with you.

In the penultimate scene of the heartrending film, "The Song of Names", a wife confesses to her husband after decades of deception, that she had slept with his best friend. He smiles at her benevolently, holds her hand lovingly, and they revert to the conjugal bed as though nothing much had transpired between them.

The message? Adultery and sex are no big deal, a mere body function, like grabbing a bite or a few drinks with someone else, no cause for hurt or pain, zero risk of loss, jealousy or injury, all in a day's - or a night's - work.

Even more shocking is that the woman is presented as an eminently positive, caring, and empathic character. Her cheating is the fault of the cad, her seducer, a quintessentially bad guy. She bears no responsibility or blame and shows no hint of guilt or remorse for her act of intimacy and sex with her spouse's closest soulmate, for years of lying to her husband, and for manipulating his relationship with her paramour (who has gone missing)

I found this histrionic almost psychopathic woman to be the truly morally reprehensible character in this yarn. Yet, evidently, no one else involved in the making of the film shared this view of her.

And, this insouciance, this indifference to perfidious immorality and profound betrayal is what makes this film a horror flick.

This is the new normal, the utter lack of inhibiting values, according to this movie: cheating on your significant other with his childhood friend, hiding it from him, manipulating his thoughts self-interestedly, then a matter of fact confession, a smile, hands held in sympathy, love unperturbed and off to bed we go. Extramarital sex as a form of forgettable, meaningless, emotional entertaining exercise. None of your spouse's business.

In the last episode of the culturally more nuanced, sensitive, and fascinating TV series "Unorthodox", a young (19), married, penniless, homeless - and pregnant - Jewish orthodox woman has a one night stand after a tour of a local bar in a foreign city (Berlin). She sleeps with a relative stranger who had been sporadically nice and helpful to her in the preceding two days. Neither of them considers her behavior a problem. No one sees anything wrong in a man taking advantage of a broken, disoriented woman. Yes, taking advantage because she is not in the right frame of mind to make even minor decisions. An interracial, multicultural, politically correct gay couple even find the whole thing hilarious and promise to keep her secret.

As long as such social, interpersonal, and sexual mores are endorsed by the mass media, our species is doomed: the monogamous, sexually exclusive couple still is the indispensable basic organizational and functional unit without which everything will grind - is grinding! - to a halt.

This is not to say that couples cannot agree and negotiate other - non-monogamous, non-exclusive, consensual - types of arrangements (such as open relationships or polyamory). But what she did was cheating, pure and simple. And, yes, I prefer "cheating" to the more sanitized and neutral versions such as "adultery", "extramarital affair" or "extradyadic sex". Where the parties do not agree to introduce other people into the couple, emotionally or sexually, and one of them does so secretly and surreptitiously, it is deceit, pure and simple. And no amount of touchy-feely "look how wonderfully tolerant we are" of rainbow-colored makeup can disguise the hideousness of the act. There is nothing aesthetic or commendable about it: it is ugly and bestial.

Our sex partners are either people who we care nothing about, emotionally insignificant and disposable - or those who mean the world to us.

But sex is mostly a physiological function: hormones rage, body systems realign. So, as far as the brain is concerned, banging a stranger is no different to copulating with your loved one. Making love to your sweetheart is not necessarily deeper, or better, or special. This is why we react to pornography so potently.

This fact creates two problems:

1. Casual sex is much more profound than we think. We force ourselves to deny and numb our reactions to it and this creates dissonances even in the most experienced cads and swingers. Conversely, we reframe sex with loved ones and confabulate to render it much more than it is.

In short: the hookup culture of rampant one night stands has pathologized behaviors, cognitions, and emotions and this adversely affects our ability to integrate physical intimacy into dyadic romantic relationships.

2. We all prefer passionate "bad guys" and "bad gals" for casual sex. But everyone is "bad", given the right partner and circumstances. As technology explodes the number of potential accessible partners, it is becoming increasingly more onerous to maintain "role constancy". Hence the supernova in adultery and cheating behaviors. We oscillate between our scripts as "good" (transactional) and "bad" (promiscuous) which fosters additional dissonance and anxiety.

 

Men are prone to sexual overperception: they misinterpret many female gestures and behaviors as invitations to copulate then and there.

 

To be mere friends with a woman is perceived by many men as a narcissistic injury. When a woman rejects a man sexually or romantically and friendzones him, it implies that she has judged him to be of inferior quality, defective, inadequate, lacking, and has rejected him as as a potential lover, partner, spouse, and father.

 

Such injury can morph into narcissistic mortification if the woman offering friendship (friendzoning) used to be, at one time, the man's date, spouse, or intimate partner and had dumped him in favor of another man with whom she has had sex (at times while cheating) or with whom she had later created a family.

 

Few - if any - men are willing to commit nowadays. What for? Sex is just around the corner, with minimal or no investment of any kind.

So, contemporary women in the reproductive age who want children are so desperate that they settle on any man willing to serve as a long-term mate.

They go even for abusers, ostentatious cheaters, alcoholics, junkies, criminals, the obviously mentally ill, and good for nothing losers and delusional wannabes as long as they are willing to tie any knot, however tenuous and no matter how reluctantly.

 

Micro-relationships are the emotional equivalents of sexual one night stands. They are short-lived (sometimes over in hours), but every bit as intense, passionate, and intimate as longer affairs.

These are not hot dates or sultry flings or desirous sexual encounters. They are full-fledged infatuations, replete with throbbing hearts, sweaty palms, and racing thoughts. They are as obsessive as the "real" thing.

Such confluences invariably culminate in one or a few rounds of torrid sex and then the parties dispose of each other one way (ghost) or another (move on to the next partner ostentatiously and hurtfully)

Out of sight, out of mind, dissociation colludes with object inconstancy to wipe out or dim the fond memories and make room for the next bout of romantic binging. Some youngsters go through 20 or 30 such liaisons a year.

 

Women fantasize about bad guys: muscular, tattooed, drop dead gorgeous. They swipe them on Tinder and read about their steamy exploits in chick lit.

But studies - including the largest ever made - have demonstrated conclusively than in real life a woman chooses a man based mainly on three factors:

1. Is he nice to her (he can be a jerk with others, but never with her);

2. Does he find her irresistibly attractive (is he into her and finds her fascinating); and

3. Is he serious about the relationship and willing to commit: provide consistent succor and fun for a brief while - or much more for a lifetime: a home, children, future, hope, common plans, companionship, and steadfast support.

These criteria apply to any type of interaction: from casual sex or a one night stand to marriage.

Courtship, therefore, can be reconceived as an extended form of virtue signalling. But women are attuned to subtle nuances: is he truly into ME - or actually into what he can get out of me? Are his commitment, attentiveness, and kindness genuine and tested - or fleeting, shallow, and forced? Women probe men continuously.

So, to dispel three myths (MGTOWs and red-pillers, pay attention):

1. The man’s looks, earning power, accomplishments, status, and toys don’t matter much in mate selection, even for a quickie in a hotel room or an apartment. Actually, nothing else matters except the three aforementioned factors; and

2. A woman always knows when you are faking it, but she gauges the effort that you are putting into your act. Even a sham performance involves investment and commitment and signals unequivocally your overwhelming interest in her. Put on a good enough production and she will go for you.

3. Women fear rejection way more than men. They break apart when they are ignored or rebuffed. Men are far more resilient and take it in stride. This is why women administer all these tests and apply these criteria rigorously: they cannot afford to be abandoned, discarded, and dumped too often.

For more, read the jaw-dropping book “A Billion Wicked Thoughts”.

 

It is rational to prefer to be with someone who feigns empathy and caring, fakes attentiveness and interest in you, and pretends to have no ulterior motives, goals, or an agenda.

 

Even when you know for a fact that the other party is attempting to manipulate you in order to secure sex for the night, gain access to your money, pick your brain, or leverage your skills or power, it is irrational to turn them down just because they are acting the part. Loneliness is a pernicious toxin with a high price tag, far greater than any alternative’s.

 

Faking it is a form of virtue signaling: it requires sustained efforts, commitment, and investment in the relationship, however faux it may be.

 

Moreover: it is a predictable behavior and conforms to social norms of conduct and mores (it is communal and prosocial). If you are aware of what’s happening, you can even enjoy the ardent courtship, the attention, succor, and time together with the faker: you get to decide on when and where to grant the thespian desperado his most fervent wishes.

 

The flip side is true as well: people who refuse to fake, pretend, play along, and white lie are either sadists or rabid misanthropes: bad news in either case. They hold you in such contempt that they see nothing in you and of yours that is of the slightest interest to them.

 

Refusing to partake in the social game of hide and seek is a form of grandiose haughtiness and a resounding slap in the collective face - and in yours as well. He who declines to even fake it when with you is sending you this message: “Your sex, your company, your mind, your love, companionship, or friendship, even your money are not worthy of even feigning the slightest interest in you or sunk capital on my part.”

 

Someone who refuses to fake is rejecting you lock, stock, and barrel and, probably, enjoying your humiliation to boot.

 

Women - and to a lesser degree, men - who are cruelly rejected by their loved ones and intimate partners, sometimes go through two phases: 1. Acting out, followed by 2. Sublimation.

The first phase involves reckless and self-destructive self-trashing: punishing oneself for one’s failure to hold on to one’s relationship or marriage. For example: women rejected by men they love often consort with lowlife scum. The temporary boost to self-esteem and the gratification of both sexual and emotional needs typically come replete with a high price tag: from rape to STDs.

Promiscuity and dissolution are followed by almost schizoid withdrawal and an obsessive-compulsive focus on religion, children, career, or activism. Sex aversion is common.

In this second phase, celibacy is coupled with growing addictive and self-soothing behaviors. Many remain stuck in this limbo for life, unable and unwilling to risk a repeat of the harrowing cycle in a new liaison.

 

Any behavior, however antisocial or even psychopathic, can be rendered normative: publicly shaming Jews in Nazi Germany or hookup casual sex in the West are two examples of misbehaviors which were considered unthinkable and engendered the most powerful psychological resistance until they were legitimized.

 

Mores and conventions reflect this shift and imbue it with ersatz social and individual meaning, context, and emotions - or their equally feigned and fallacious absence. Persecuting Jews was described as a historical Manichean mission and one night stands are nowadays untruthfully cast as meaningless, emotionless, and ahistorical (not a part of the participants's biographies).

 

Adultery is one such example. It is now largely socially tolerated, if not accepted: at worst, it is considered an embarrassing - but not always regrettable - incidental aberration that is irrelevant to the rest of the couple's life together. Multidecadal sexual exclusivity and monogamy are unnatural, the thinking goes, cheating helps to let off steam and spice up the dyad.

 

Such justifications and rationales are invariably counterfactual. Faithfulness is a test of character, resisting temptation is an aerobic exercise for the mental muscles and moral sinews that set us apart from other animals. And cheating reveals inordinate and crucial amounts of information about the character - or lack thereof - of the offender (especially where deception and coverup ensue). It is a litmus test of the resilience, reality, and feasibility of the relationship - and the dark side, the shadow of everyone involved. It is nothing short of cataclysmic, regardless of the particular circumstances.

 

MATE SELECTION

 

Alpha males are self-confident, empathic, team players, negotiators, and motivators. They induce harmony and integrate feminine and masculine traits and skills. The exact opposite of the nonsense sold to the gullible by con artist dating and business "coaches" or within the intellectually challenged misogynistic Neanderthals of the Manosphere.

 

“Alpha males are not born, and they don't achieve their position based purely on size and temperament. The primate alpha male is a much more complex and responsible being than a bully.

Merciless tyrants do sometimes rise to the top in a chimpanzee community, but the more typical alphas that I have known were quite the opposite. Males in this position are not necessarily the biggest, strongest, meanest ones around, since they often reach the top with the assistance of others. In fact, the smallest male may become alpha if he has the right supporters. Most alpha males protect the underdog, keep the peace, and reassure those who are distressed. Analyzing all instances in which one individual hugs another who has lost a fight, we found that although females generally console others more often than do males, there is one striking exception: the alpha male. This male acts as the healer-in-chief, comforting others in agony more than anyone else in the community. As soon as a fight erupts among its members, everyone turns to him to see how he is going to handle it. He is the final arbiter, intent on restoring harmony. He will impressively stand between screaming parties, with his arms raised, until things calm down."

(Mama's Last Hug by Frans de Waal, W.W. Norton & Company, 2019)

 

But, biographies of great men invariably start with a physical description of their external appearance: Napoleon's height, Kennedy's youth, or Hitler's piercing eyes.

When I post videos, most of the comments refer to the color of my hair, whether I am handsome or reptilian, and do I look fatigued or rejuvenated.

The primitive circuitry of our brains is focused on mate selection and the propagation of our selfish genes. Looks matter because they convey inordinate amounts of instantly accessible information about our heredity, health, and constitution.

Nor is this preference temporary or limited to sexual, romantic, or intimate affairs.

Studies have shown that people who are physically attractive are employed much more often and earn much more money than their pedestrian, better qualified, competitors.

Women willingly enter relationships with - or give their bodies to - evident, clearly visible male scum only because these lowlifes had never ADMITTED publicly to being narcissists, or owned up to it. On the contrary: they make themselves out to be the victims and women are all over them, offering maternal healing and love and sex.

I am being punished because of my HONESTY: I had informed women of WHO and WHAT I am. They know that they may be able to hurt me - but they have no power over me: they have nothing I either need or want. My total aloofness, self-sufficiency, and independence drives women nuts. It threatens and infuriates them.

So, women - documentarists, "friends", collaborators, wannabe lovers - are terrified of me, rage at me, and hate my guts just because they KNOW WHO I AM. And who told them who I am? I DID!

Women see that the men they started dating or fucking are sick and dangerous trash but they keep hoping that they may be wrong about these men. Or they keep deluding themselves that they will control, manipulate, co-opt, "fix" and "heal" these bad boys. They keep convincing themselves that these men are safe, will damage only others. Malignant optimism.

But in my case, women cannot lie to themselves and deceive themselves because I have told them repeatedly that I am a monster who can never be tamed or healed. They know that I will be with them only as long as they function and are useful to me. Not a second longer. I invest in women only a fraction of what I can extract from them. Not an ounce more. Ever. Never. So they set out to annihilate me, often by "in your face" cheating with the aforementioned scum.

Many men are my facsimile, my soulmates. But these men pretend to be empathic, loving, supportive, and caring. And women lap it up, lock, stock, and barrel, to mix my metaphors. It is repulsive to behold.

Lesson: Men! Never out yourselves. Women crave fantasy and deceit. So, tell them what they want to hear, pretend profusely, and they will become your codependent slaves or your one night stand sluts or worse. It works every time. The opposite strategy - of being truthful about who you are - sucks. Male authenticity only renders women rabid, virulent and sadistic enemies.

 

Women initiate the majority of breakups and divorces. When men end relationships, they just walk away. Women tend to be more circumspect: they misbehave with other men, act passive-aggressively, and undermine intimacy in a variety of indirect ways.

To generalize, women tend to rupture the bond only in four cases:

1. Extreme abuse and rejection by the intimate partner

2. Chaotic dysfunction of the dyad leading to unfavorable and inefficacious outcomes;

3. The partner's clinging, abandonment/separation anxiety, and demands for suspension of the woman's personal autonomy within the relationship

4. Some women are terrified of intimacy, are pain averse, and commitmentphobes. When the partner demands a dedicated joint future with increasing closeness, they recoil in horror and act out, sabotaging the budding togetherness.

Dysregulated emotions and approach-avoidance repetition compulsions are prevalent among women traumatized by previous liaisons or with mental health disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder or mood disorders.

 

DOUBLE STANDARD

 

If a woman goes mountaineering with a man and borrows his tough muscles to help her through a rough pass - she is an athlete.

If a woman crams for an exam together with a man tapping his brain for his knowledge - she is a scholar.

When a woman picks up a stranger in a bar and makes use of his penis to reach an orgasm - she is a slut.

When a man sells access to his brain for 300 euros an hour (yes, this is my going rate) - he is a consultant or a counsellor.

But when a woman charges 300 euros to access her vagina - she is a cheap whore.

And guess just WHO wrote all these rules!

 

Time for #MenToo (Brussels Morning)

 

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) of the United Kingdom (UK) has recently criminalized “lovebombing”: overzealous flirting in the first phase of a relationship.

 

There is no debate that rape and other forms of sexual assault should be punished severely.

 

But we are criminalizing and stigmatizing sex itself as well as most forms of flirting and courting.

 

Large swathes of romance and inter-dyadic dynamics are now promulgated as delinquent as is the majority of inter-gender interactions.

 

We have sterilized lovemaking and rendered it transactional with the novel requirement for “enthusiastic consent”.

 

The law in many countries is heavily biased in favor of women: shockingly, rape is defined in the UK as the misuse of a penis only!

 

The justice system and “rape shield laws” have all but eradicated due process and the ability to defend oneself – if one is a man that is.

 

Nine out of ten conceivable and indispensable defense strategies are inadmissible and impermissible in cases involving intimate relationships. This is unprecedented and has no equivalent in any other type of criminal offense.

The laudable idea is to accord women some protection from public shaming and retraumatization. But victims of all crimes feel humiliated and are traumatized.

 

There is no reason whatsoever to single out rape, let alone sexual assault.

Literally every sex act is now construed as sexual assault. Half of all men and women report being wary of each other in the workplace (Pew Center).

 

Memory is highly unreliable: it degrades and is reframed with time (E. Loftus). Therefore, sexual offenses should be time debarred (there should be a statute of limitations) akin to other forms of bodily harm and assault.

 

Yet, in some countries in the West, rape is equated with murder: a complaint can be filed – and often is – decades after the alleged events have taken place.

 

The cyclical argument is: only 2-6% of sex crimes allegations are false. The proof? The conviction rate. Yet, the true number is probably ten times that, according to multiple studies.

 

Women are weaponizing these newfound juridical powers and are colluding in groups to ruin men’s lives. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, celebrities have become the preferred targets – and lucrative settlements are all the rage among their victims, real and alleged.

 

Lying is much more common among certain psychopathological profiles, such as personality disorders. As the incidence and prevalence of Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial, Paranoid, and Histrionic personality disorders increases among women, the likelihood of mendacity among complainants is skyrocketing.

 

Liars should be punished as harshly as the penalties are for the offenses that they allege. Yet, very few of them are even prosecuted for fear of exerting a chilling effect on real victims.

 

Enthusiastic consent is an impractical, stultifying constraint: no two individuals maintain the same level of passion for any specific sex act. Good sex involves compromise and the wish to please one another – not selfish gratification. We are reducing sex to mutual masturbation.

 

The entire debate feeds off toxic versions of both feminism and masculinity. Misandrist sentiments equate the unraveling of the patriarchy with retribution for millennia of subjugation. The woke, politically correct ideal is to eliminate gender altogether (unigender and the stalled revolution).

 

The pendulum has swung too far against men: young men are terrified to approach young women; every signaling behavior, however innocuous, amounts to sexual harassment; flirting and courting in the real world (IRL) are widely considered creepy and are even criminalized.

 

Women are dissonant. They are caught between the still dominant sexual double standard (hypervigilant virtue) and invulnerability signaling: “I am the helpless victim, but I am also empowered, agentic, unaffected, and untouchable.”

Throughout post-modern societies, entitled grandiose victimhood has replaced dignity and reputational social control.

 

Current laws and their interpretation by the courts incentivize hyperbole or counterfactual reframing in a spiral of ever more fantastic accusations and allegations.

 

The aforementioned rise of narcissism, borderline (which is now being reconceived as a form of secondary psychopathy), and primary psychopathy among women leads to extreme fantasies, emotional dysregulation, acting out, psychotic microepisodes, dissociation, infantilism, and alloplastic defenses (blaming others for the predictable consequences and outcomes of your own regretted choices and decisions, never taking responsibility, never apologizing, never feeling guilty or blameworthy).

 

We must transition from the nebulous construct of enthusiastic consent towards behavioral or transactional consent. Behaviors before and after the fact provide an indispensable and often indisputable context. Post-facto remorse should not transform the acts performed into unwitting crimes.

 

Transactional sex should never be criminalized, regardless of the identities of the willing participants: power asymmetries are inherent in every give and take, sexual or not. Moreover: women have always been the sexual gatekeepers and have been trading sex for favors since the dawn of Mankind.

 

Additionally, we should define far more narrowly and rigorously criminal offenses such as coercive control.

 

Finally: the playing field should be levelled. Many women are primary breadwinners, more educated than men, and have been known to be abusive, too – yet there are almost no persecutions of women for such offenses despite these clear power asymmetries.

 

For example:

 

Marital rape is criminalized as it should be. But the withholding of sex, affection, and intimacy should also be criminalized: it amounts to mental cruelty and is a manipulative control technique (a form of Machiavellianism).

 

Women should be prosecuted for harassment (including of the sexual sort), stalking, defamation, coercion, rape, and a host of other offenses currently enforced exclusively against men.

 

Equal power confers equal responsibility and equal liabilities. Women are having it both ways nowadays. It is time to end this malpractice. The alternative is a reactionary male backlash against the hard-earned rights of women. We are witnessing the harbingers of this disturbing trend all over the globe, from rescinded abortion rights in the USA to Russia and Afghanistan where domestic violence has been decriminalized and access to the public sphere is being denied, respectively.

 

Also Read

Gender and the Narcissist

The Roots of Pedophilia

The Pathology of Love

The Natural Roots of Sexuality

Ethical Relativism and Absolute Taboos

Homosexual and Transsexual Narcissists

The Offspring of Aeolus: On the Incest Taboo

Psychosexual Stages of Development

Sex and Personality Disorders

Narcissists, Sex and Fidelity

Narcissists, Psychopaths, Sex, and Marital Fidelity

Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hide (Somatic vs. Cerebral Narcissists)

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