chimerically | just the links, ma'am, just the links

Entry tags:

just the links, ma'am, just the links

Why are there so few girl characters in kids' movies? And what's up with "purity balls" and this obsession with "naive abstinence"? (I actually have some ideas about where the whole virginity obsession comes from, but I'll save that for another rant.)

That is all.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Women's ability to produce children is the greatest resource the human race has."

What makes you say this? Every organism on the planet has the ability to reproduce itself. I don't see it as the most important resource of human society beyond the most basic need for continuing the species.
In fact, the most important resource the human species has at its disposal is the capacity for reason and conscious thought, the ability to subvert "animal" urges: hunger, discomfort, lust, anger, selfishness--what were codified as "deadly sins" by everyone's favorite tightasses, the Catholics--in favor of "higher" reasoning. After a certain age, you don't beat up your brother just because he got the last cookie because you know your mother's going to go to the store and buy more and you'll get one. You don't start pawing the first attractive woman you see at a party because you've learned to enjoy the courtship process that helps you determine your the suitability of your intended mate (and remember folks, even lizards have courtship!).
Society has placed a lot of checks and balances against succumbing to these potentially destructive forces. Most of them are skewed towards "protecting", which ultimately turns into "repressing" female sexuality. I'd like to believe that it's out of a sense of respect for the obviously enormous power of said sexuality, but I don't think any of these purity-ball dads retain any of that anymore.
This is why matrilineal societies make more sense, in those pre-DNA-test days. It is very easy to muddy the waters about who someone's father is. It is much, much harder to obfuscate who came out of whose womb.
As for being with people who have had lots of partners, women have been dealing with this for years. Be glad s/he's with *you* now, learn a few original tricks to blow those other memories out of the water, and for god's sake keep quiet about it. Very few people get dumped solely on the basis of their sexual performance.

I said: "Women's ability to produce children is the greatest resource the human race has."
You said:
What makes you say this? Every organism on the planet has the ability to reproduce itself. I don't see it as the most important resource of human society beyond the most basic need for continuing the species.

Your second sentence says it all. I didn't mean anything beyond that, but I find that pretty significant. If we don't reproduce, we die out, and any other resources we may or may not have are pretty damn useless. Now, obviously, we need both male and female to do this reproducing thing. However, the female half is clearly the limiting factor, since it takes 9 months in her body, and then an additional 2-4 years of infertility is associated with each child. (In modern society, with formula and an abudance of food, fertility returns much quicker.)

Yeah, but any idiot can--and will--make babies. It's hardwired in, and it's such a given that we're going to do it that it doesn't set us apart from any other species. That was my point.

Ah, I see. I never meant to imply that reproducing made us any different than animals. I don't think we are much other than animals, as it happens.

This subthread further cements my respect for folks like Dawkins who are willing to take on the thankless task of trying to communicate this stuff to folks who aren't in their field. Seems like it's always 10% making points, 90% explaining why you didn't mean what you're being accused of.

Also, I don't think the worries about virginity have much at all to do with fear that your partner had other better partners in the past. People talk about that, of course, but it's not a truly logical response. It's just words to justify a gut feeling. The question is, why do people tend to have that gut feeling?

The question is, why do people tend to have that gut feeling?

Those people are fundamentally insecure, and it's just another axis over which to develop an inferiority complex. If it's not sexual performance, it's something else.

Those people are fundamentally insecure, and it's just another axis over which to develop an inferiority complex. If it's not sexual performance, it's something else.

I'm not so sure. If I imagine a conversation that includes a reference to sexual performance, replacing the sexual performance by monetary performance doesn't work as well. Certainly, people can feel inadequate in terms of their wages, but the sexual thing seems weightier. And I can much more readily imagine a guy worried about being good enough in bed than a man worried he's not sensitive enough.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

just the links, ma'am, just the links

Re: virginity

Re: virginity

Re: virginity

Re: virginity

Re: virginity

Re: virginity

Re: virginity

Re: virginity