We prefer our pets to other people and that’s fair. You know what it costs you to take care of a pet, but you don’t know what it may cost you to let another man live.

Beware the genius: He will dump our work and writings and our very names into insignificance and oblivion. We know why we want him dead – the sooner the better.

A writer is a person who writes books and then sends them to a grocer for his or her opinion.

Pornology

The present section is dedicated to my friend X (an appropriate pseudonym), famous in the whole seventh arrondissement of Paris for having said: “I’m not interested in sex, only in porn.”

Dr Robin Baker wrote: “Sex is everywhere, from Web to television.” It will be our privilege to see that, when he wrote this, in 2006, sex was almost nowhere. It is us who will know what it means to say that sex is everywhere. (One major reason can be found in “Sperm-Improving Pornography,” xxxii) In the same way that exposure to commercial messages rose from 1,000 per day in 1989 to 10,000 per day in 2007 (a 900 percent increase in about twenty years)*, we shall witness an exponential increase in exposure to pornographic material in the next decades. (Those complaining that they just can’t turn their eyes somewhere without being flashed porn, will be instructed to respect the others’ choice and freedom.)

Porn is free (just type “porn” in your browser and enjoy). As advertisements on porn websites are still porn, in a way porn is even ad-free: You could watch the ads merely and still be enjoying porn. Porn is free and ad-free. What economics is that?

Product placement in porn: You could have the male performer wear nothing during the performance but a conspicuous pair of Nike sneakers for instance (the red ones). Masturbation conditioning is very efficient (cf. Rachman, Eysenck). Let a man masturbate to ejaculation repeatedly on porn scenes with product placement and he will afterwards “salivate” at the mere sight of the products on store displays. But brands don’t do that, I am told. Although they often enough rely on sexploitation in their advertising – with sycophants warning us to refrain from ejaculating outcries because there is no such thing as bad publicity –, they are very shy, then, when it comes to making use of the possibilities open to them with porn. What are they waiting for? Are they not after the money?

Mass media civilization means psychoticism, because mass media are conditioning maladaptive sexuality (crystal screen sexploitation conditioning), and psychotics, according to Eysenck, are the least conditionable.

“Research suggests that sexual content in still pictures elicits automatic attention in viewers.” (Annie Lang et al., in Sex in Advertising, 2003, ed. Tom Reichert & Jacqueline Lambiase) Evolution theory predicts that this will be true for men more than for women: “Symons proposed that the primary adaptations responsible for the occurrence of rape were the mechanisms involved in the human male’s greater visual sexual arousal [my emphasis], greater autonomous sex drive, reduced ability to abstain from sexual activity, much greater desire for sexual diversity per se, greater willingness to engage in impersonal sex, and less discriminating criteria for sexual partners.” (Thornhill & Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, 2000) Given these adaptations, porn is a male-impacting conditioning technology from which women are largely immune. The more porn addiction is consuming men’s time, the more men are removed from the social process, a tendency consistent with the idea that, as social progress means furthering the eradication of war and violence in human relationships, it implies the subjection of the most violent sex of the two.

“Rankings by Internet audience-tracking services ignore the popularity of such sites [porn sites].” (J. Lambiase, in Sex in Advertising). However, “Alexa Research found sex to be the most popular search term between March 1999 and January 2001, based on more than 42 million search pages viewed in aggregate by users at 10 portal or search engine Web sites.” (ibid.)

Sex is everywhere? We have seen nothing yet.

When my friend X (an appropriate pseudonym) said “I’m not interested in sex, only in porn,” I told him he couldn’t make babies by simply watching porn. He answered: “I’ve always fancied making children was something people had to be induced to by state help. As a rule the state taxes success. Progressive income tax is a tax on natural endowments, you know. We are a meritocracy that likes to load merit down. Here, however, by giving family policy money to all but the childless, the state remunerates reproductive success and taxes failure. This is madness.” Something along those lines. I think he’s barmy.

Caciquismo and Reproductive Inequalities

More data on the question of who’s having the greater number of children, the poor or the rich (men). For the previous discussion of this topic, see, among other stuff, xxxi and xxxii.

“A study that matched men and children based on seven blood types documented precisely how much more risk men lacking resources run of being genetically cuckolded. Of men in the highest socioeconomic bracket, only 2 percent of the children had fathers other than the putative father. Among the middle class, the genetic-cuckoldry rate rose to 12 percent. And among the lower class, the genetic-cuckoldry rate rose to 20 percent. Since genetic cuckoldry can only occur when women have affairs, it’s clear that men lacking resources experience more paternity uncertainty.” (David Buss, The Murderer Next Door, 2005).

The source is a study on a Mexican population (Cerda-Flores, Barton, Marty-Gonzalez, Rivas & Chakraborty, “Estimation of Nonpaternity in the Mexican Population of Nuevo Leon: A Validation Study with Blood Group Markers,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 109, 1999). Apparently, Buss has no hesitation in generalizing these findings to Western societies. Mexico is an interesting country (I lived there as a child) but personally I would be more cautious about generalizing the results, if “developmental causes” (causal input from genes and environment) make any sense. Truly, Nuevo Leon is a rather advanced state in the country, with the same standard of living (according to Wikipedia) as Croatia or Poland, but the wealth and activity are concentrated in the state capital, Monterrey, the remaining parts being rural, poor, and probably very traditionally minded; so, much depends on the sample.

By traditionally minded, I mean traditional Mexican caciquismo, where high-status men must not be expected to be more literate nor articulate nor knowledgeable than the other men. In traditional societies IQ is more widespread across social classes, in advanced societies more concentrated in the upper classes (this is “meritocracy,” cf. Herrnstein & Murray 1994); and high IQ associates with traits such as restraint, conscientiousness, etc. Convincing data would be the correlation between symmetry (low fluctuating asymmetry) and status: if negative, or insignificant, I must be right because the springboard effect (see xxxii) must then be strong, the duality of women’s strategy must be great, they would cuckold the rich with the poor. In any case, developmental causes should make us cautious about generalizing results from one population to another.

My expectation as to the correlation between symmetry and status is that it is negative, but it seems that evolutionary psychologists’ expectation is the reverse. For instance, when Thornhill and Palmer equate symmetry with “greater social dominance,” one is led to think that symmetry means high status, but here is what they write: “That symmetric men appear to engage in more fights with other men than asymmetric men do may be due to their greater social dominance and their larger body size.” (A Natural History of Rape). Seemingly, Thornhill and Palmer equate social dominance with fistfight. As fistfight, however, is a clear sign that the endowments enabling one to cope with our societies’ high-status requirements are lacking, I cannot equate social dominance, in that case, with high status. We would be dealing only with the fringe, with gangsters and the like, people whose peculiar talents may enable them to secure resources and (what kind of) women, but not in the daylight nor in the broad arena.

If, now, by “fight” is meant economic or political competition, then as both nowadays take place in the context of cooperative organizations whose recruitment is based on academic degrees and where the characteristics of symmetric men are at a disadvantage – are simply not welcome –, the contention makes no sense at all. The myth that aggressiveness and “maleness” are requirements of top-management activities is a relic of a vanished past, sustained by media spin. Top managers of our private-public technostructure have solid records of geek compliance from Ivy League, Oxbridge, grandes écoles, and the like. Seeing them, based on spin and old adaptations, as caciques will not help you understand the world we live in.

Rape and Recantations

In xxxiii, I dealt with the debate regarding false accusations of rape by women in nineteenth-century Britain. With awe and shivers, I even stated that the whole affair might not merely be the display of rancid male chauvinism expected from such ages of darkness. Even evolutionary psychologists have not dared go that far and, tormented by guilt, I was about to recant.

The main point in my doubt was that those male chauvinists did not seem to be at all aware of the fact that it is costly for a woman to advertise herself as having being raped. For instance, “Many men whose partners have been raped express the feeling that they are now left with ‘damaged goods.’ They report that they cannot bear the thought of remaining with a woman who has been sexually violated by another man. According to one study, more than 80 percent of couples in which the woman was raped during the relationship end up breaking up.” (D. Buss, The Murderer Next Door). That, among other things, would make a false accusation of rape very costly to the woman, whatever her goals may be for lying.

However, new data came to my attention which shows that such false accusations are still frequent. “A careful study of 109 rape cases in the United States found 41 percent of rape accusations to be false as evidenced by the women’s own recantations (Kanin 1994).” (Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape). The lie could be the recantation itself rather than the accusation, when the woman becomes aware afterwards of the cost to her fitness from being known or perceived as a rape victim. Still, these numerous recantations cannot all be lies (can they) and we remain with a significant number of false accusations, so much more puzzling because of their cost to the women themselves. Thornhill and Palmer go on saying: “The women studied gave three reasons for their false reports: providing an alibi for a consensual encounter that might have led to pregnancy, seeking revenge against a rejecting consensual male partner and obtaining sympathy and attention from kin and/or friends. Kanin emphasizes that false rape allegations ‘reflect desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations’.” (ibid.) In the face of this new evidence, there is no recanting possible.

According to Thornhill and Palmer, 13 percent of American women over 18 report having being raped at least once in their life (from Kilpatrick et al. 1992, for the National Victim Center, Arlington, Virginia). They add: “Kilpatrick et al. estimate the percentage of rapes of women not reported at between 66 and 84.” This leads to vertiginous figures for, if 13 percent is correct, then, with a 84 percent figure of rapes unreported, the percentage of women actually raped would be 81.25; with 66 percent unreported, it would be 38.2**. Thus, the number of women raped in America would lie somewhere between about four and more than eight out of ten. In comparison, the International Statistics on Crime and Justice (2010) by the United Nations give a reported rape rate for US of 28.6 per 100,000 people (source Wikipedia), that is, 0.0286 percent. Who’s pulling our leg and why? Such fantastic discrepancies in official sources are very disturbing.

March 21, 2016

*“According to the industry house organ Advertising Age, the average North American perceives some 1,000 ads daily.” (W. B. Key 1989). & “People are inundated daily by an average of 10,000 sales messages” (Renvoisé and Morin 2007).

**If 84% of rapes are unreported, the 13 women out of a hundred who report having being raped are only 16% of all actual cases of rape, and in reality 1,300/16 = 81.25% of American women would have been raped (with some degree of correction for women being raped several times over their lifetime). If 66% are unreported, the actual number of raped women is 1,300/34 = 38.2%. (Maybe this little calculation is in fact irrelevant. If a young woman is raped, under threat not to talk, once every other day by her stepfather for years, that makes thousands of rapes but one victim. But, in that case, the supposed figures for unreported rapes are not much relevant either.)