I don’t think that anyone would argue against there being sexual instincts ingrained into us that exist beneath our socially constructed views towards sex.
I remember reading that men have a strong biological need to know their woman is faithful since they have no means of knowing that the children she bears are his. If a woman has an emotional betrayal of her man by say sending a love letter to another man, but never actually consummates that emotional betrayal with sexual infidelity, then this is easier for her man to forgive than if she made a purely sexual betrayal without any emotional investment in the man she cheated with.
For the woman, the circumstances are flip-flopped in that they have an easier time dealing with sexual infidelity as long as the man has not betrayed her emotionally. Her evolutionary instincts are to ensure that the man she chooses will stick by her to help her raise her child. Because of this an emotional betrayal such as the above mentioned love letter, that is never acted upon sexually can actually be more difficult for a woman to forgive.
Clearly these are generalizations, and we of course can prove who the father of children are now with DNA. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary instincts that will likely take longer than the few years we have been able to determine paternity to work itself out though. I think these patterns seem to be generally true just from anecdotes I’ve heard over the years, but I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule. Does anyone know the theory/essay/book etc. I’m paraphrasing? I’d be interested to look over the original work again.
It seems those themes tend to play themselves out in fantasies that men and women have, at least according to that link Marina posted earlier.
As far as the other stuff Marina has been posting, several links were heavily biased and really didn’t show a causal link between pornography and violence towards women. I think domestic abuse, rape and other crimes against women are horrendous, but I also think it’s a stretch to pin the blame on porn. Women have been getting domestically abused, raped and sexually assaulted long before the current proliferation of porn. Why these activists don’t focus their efforts on addressing those issues directly completely baffles me. $100 dollars spent on teaching young women about the common patterns of spousal abuse and what warning signs to look out for in their future relationships would do a hell of a lot more to help reduce domestic abuse than using it to lobby against porn which is likely not even causally linked to the problem. Surely there’s no surprise that sex offenders like porn, but isn’t it also very likely that sex offenders are just perverts who happen to be drawn to porn as opposed to the porn corrupting fine, upstanding men into evil sex-offending misogynists?
I also think the fear of kids seeing porn is probably significantly overhyped. That one site claimed that the average age boys see a playboy is 11—Is it really that strange that boys going through puberty would be curious about sex? Furthermore, if this is the case, clearly it doesn’t have a huge evil impact on society since the vast majority of men who viewed pornography at that age aren’t sexual criminals now that they’re all grown up.
There’s even a part of me that thinks that kids around the time they hit high school should be exposed to porn in a controlled way. Perhaps if those movies focused on portraying sex in a safe, healthy, and mutually respectful way young men and women would grow up with a much saner view of sexuality-and likely decrease the demand for the less demeaning stuff. I know there were kids in Florida who were drinking bleach after sex to prevent the transmission of std’s (they had an abstinence-only sex-ed program at their school).
And what’s with our society saying that you can be tried and sentenced as an adult at 14, but aren’t mature enough to see a vagina or learn how it works. I think men are generally pretty clueless when it comes to the anatomy of women (and even many women who are clueless about their own anatomy). I’m pretty sure this is a likely culprit for the high percentage of women who have never experienced an orgasm before. And what’s the message there? That the woman’s pleasure is less/not important compared to the man’s pleasure.
Sorry for the rant, but these moralizers really get under my skin.