What makes sexual alternatives attractive?

Human beings aren’t just one kind of thing. We’re one kind of thing, layered on top of another kind of thing, layered on top of a whole other thing, system built upon system upon system at different levels of function and expression and reality, and they all bleed into one another and affect one another and cause feedback up and down the ladder. Everything affects everything. From epigenetics up through psychology and into social history and metaphysics, the most complex thing in existence is a human being, and we’re present at all levels of analysis and existence and can be affected and cause effects at all levels.

So, having said that, I’m going to hone in on just a single thing that, for men, makes someone sexually attractive. And that something is very simple. And it’s availability. Men are attracted by someone who wants them, chooses them, desires them, who allows them in, who wants to be taken or achieved. I think this a biological, psychological, and sociological fact. Men are irresistibly drawn in by someone who wants them. Now, that might sound obvious, everyone likes people who like them. But there so much to it than that.

I recall Mike Birbiglia discussing arguing with his girlfriend about whether women want sex just like men do. And the basic answer was yes, of course they want sex. But in the same way, under the same conditions, in the same amount, just like men do? So he posed his girlfriend a question, “Have you ever masturbated while driving a car?” To which she, shocked, had to say no. “Then don’t tell me it’s the same,” he concluded.

The lengths to which men will go, the frequency, the daily (instead of monthly) cycle of hormones, the endless parade of things men have done and the ways they have thrown away their own carefully built lives and the lives of others just for one more chance to mate, is quite shocking. It’s such a obvious fact to everyone everywhere across all times and places, that it takes a great effort to disconnect yourself ideologically enough from reality to ignore it. It’s so well-established scientifically that men and women pursue different mating behaviors and strategies across all cultures and eras that it ain’t really worth arguing about.

Are women sexual? Of course. But differently so, as a class. The selectivity of human females is written across our history and our genes. You have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. Twice as many. Selection is hard on males, they have a far higher competitive pressure merely from a genetic standpoint. As a man, you have only half the chances of a woman of passing your genes on to future generations. And if you have no male heirs, your Y chromosome, your unique genetic inheritance, will cease to exist, only to be carried on by your brothers, if you have any. Women, almost as a rule, won’t choose men who are shorter than them, younger than them, or less successful than them. Women expect to marry up, for you to prove your worth, and if you don’t, you can fall into the genetic dustbin of history.

And that’s a pretty rough fate, pretty hard on you at every level. From your biology to your psychology to your social standing. Dave Chappell observed that the test of a man, in life, is a woman. Female selection, judgment of whether he is worthy of being desired, whether he measures up. Females are represented, archytypically, as nature; nature, as Jordan Peterson points out, is that which selects.

What is the number one thing men try to do with success? They use it to increase their mating opportunities. Women will do all kinds of things with success. But men will mostly do this one thing. They will either try to increase their mating opportunities (because that is the one huge exceptional biological pressure they feel keenly on a daily basis, and genetically is their greatest vulnerability; by being born male there’s a 50% smaller chance they’ll pass on their genes in the long term), or they will pursue alternatives to distract themselves or pacify themselves so they don’t have to face their feelings of need and failure and vulnerability that their sex burdens them with. And yes, some of those alternatives and distractions can get pretty extreme and even antisocial.

So, what do I mean that “availability” is what men find attractive? Is availability any different from a general display of interest? I think it is. Availability means available to you, interested in you, excited about you. What men want, often is someone who feels about them the way they feel. They want to be an object of desire. Or at least, perhaps more accurately, to have their own desire be irresistible. To have their desire be ultimately welcomed, their status as a desire able mate to be ultimately affirmed, and met with absolute welcome.

What exactly is the appeal of pornography? I think there are many facets, of course. The ability to see more women and imagine more sexual exploits than are possible in real life. The ability to live out imaginatively certain dreams and fantasies that are otherwise impractical or impossible to achieve in real life. The ability to taste forbidden pleasures from a position of relative safety. And, most fundamentally of all, to discocer a universe of women who are ready to welcome me and approve me in the most intimate way possible, by taking off their clothes and letting me inside them. Women who will hunger for it, beg for it, enjoy it, value it, who are either driving the situation with their overwhelming desire for me or are overwhelming open to my advances. Women, in other words, who desire men the way that men desire women. These women are easy to please. They want you to give it to them. They’re so horny they can’t restrain themselves. They would probably masturbate while driving. About you, no less.

A man’s penis is like an embodiment of his own spirit. I know that sounds weird, like something from some pagan religion. But those religions are just trying to express certain psychological realities people were feeling and trying to explain in a way that people could comorehend and embody and transmit. Men’s penises are the only part of a human body specifically designed to enter another human body. It’s an external internal organ. A very delicate and vulnerable one. It carries with it the essence of the man himself, the only human cell designed to leave the human body and go adventuring, the sperm.

That’s a weird organ, and that’s a weird cell. And in order to serve its purpose and fulfill its function it has to get to the least accessible, most protected place in another person. That’s quite a tricky proposition, a real risk and challenege. A woman basically has to lay herself out for a man to be able to do that. So on every level, socially, economically, emotionally, physically, sex is a challenge and a test. You can fail it in so many different ways. And even if you make it all the way, if you’ve passed all the gatekeeping and made it, you still need to prove yourself. Performance, proving your manliness, your skill, your vitality, your endurance, all the performance that confirms the evaluation of you as a worthy lover.

And your long-term success as a lover (and maybe also short-term) may even affect your fecundity. Orgasms increase oxytocin levels that improve female fertility. The data for the short term effects of female orgasm on things like sperm retention and overall fertility is a bit mixed. But being in a secure relationship where your lover demonstrates that he can skillfully understand you and meet your needs (which is a bit more of a challenge, physically, than it is with men), will raise oxytocin and reduce stress, as well as make more shots at that goal more likely.

The primary means for addressing the sources of physical and psychological sexual dysfunction in females is to remove stressors and barriers, to remove the brakes, as it were (not the addition of accelerants). Stress lowers female fertility, a response to negative biological and psychological feedback. Not by an enormous amount; the system is made to work, after all, orgasms or no, security or no, but it does have a real, measureable impact.

But back to what a penis means and what semen means to a man. That’s a symbolic, and literal, extension of himself. He’s putting it out there into the world, as he puts himself out socially and romantically. The acceptance of his penis is connected to the acceptance of his own efforts and his success at overcoming the selective barriers that the world puts up (and that women put up, or at least take into consideration). His sperm is himself, his bit of him that can go out into the world, be accepted, take root, and go on after him. It’s his legacy in a very competitive environment where legacies are often dearly bought and easily lost. It’s an essence of himself.

So how that sperm is received matters a lot of men. It’s an object of physical, emotional, and psychological fantasy, because it has great biological, emotional, and psychological significance to him. Men fantasize about having their sperm treated in some very silly and strange ways because to them its not just a bit of fluid. It’s not like spitting on a sidewalk. Men want women to want their semen. They want to ejacualte into women, without protection. If a woman performs oral sex, they want her to swallow, or otherwise to adorn herself in it and delight in it (another form of figurative acceptance, not so different from swallowing, which itself has no obvious functional purpose for fertility, since it didn’t end up where it needs to be, but sends the same sort of message).

And that message is really just, I want you. I approve you. I admit you. I want your semen, your essence. It is a lovely thing, precious; I delight in it and bathe in it, as you long to bathe and glory and be immersed in my beauty. As a man desires and delights in being sloppily engulfed in the precious, delightful wetness of a woman (which signals arousal and acceptance of him), he also may wish to baptize her similarly in his own symbolic self and have it be similarly welcomed.

This, of course, isn’t the whole story (as everything is complex), but it is certainly an important part of the phenomena. People have come up with all kinds of weird ideas about semen over the years. It’s always held a totemic power, long before the biological complexities of it were fully understood scientifically. They were explored and understood experientially, existentially. They were felt and considered and communicated through story and ritual and convention.

Men want their existence validated through the acceptance of their penis and their semen. Through it, they secure their place in history, their bit of godhood and immortality (emotionally, biologically, psychologically). They lift themselves out of the mass of disappearing male ancestors and prove themselves worthy of being selected and continuing. They pass the test of life. They have achieved greatness.

Women are the judges, and women have historically been pretty selective judges. Closer to bower birds, as a group, than chimpanzees. Not all women, certainly, but a lot of them. Women are statistically much more likely to be displeased with a relationship, and from a psychological standpoint more subject to negative emotion in general. Women are the biggest supporters of no fault divorce. Whether that fact reflects best the inadequacy of men or the more stringent standards of women is up to your interpretation. I imagine each sex would give a different answer.

I’m just observing the phenomena of how men think and feel in this discussion, and some of the mechanisms that underlie those thoughts and feelings. I’m not saying that those thoughts and feelings are entirely reducible to them. Each level of human function and existence is its own complex system layered on top of another system, and another, and all are interconnected and speak to one another. And what you find at one level should make sense and be confirmed and played out at another.

The same phenomena have meaning and make sense and impact us and be responded to across all levels simultaneously, especially with something like sex that transcends all the different levels of our being. Biological, historical, social, relational, emotional, chemical, genetic, parental, creative, personal, physical. Every bit of who we are comes into play in sex and the relations between the sexes. It’s a whole, complex thing where we touch every bit of ourselves and who we are and try to connect it to every bit of someone else, with massive consequences.

It’s strange. A bit of movement, a bit of pleasure, a bit of fluid, and you’ve got a whole new human life coming into existence. A new purpose, a new story, a new future, a new part of history, a new combination of body and mind and feelings all from that little act. It’s such a minor, mundane, physical act that it’s hard to see why it’s such a big deal. And it is such a big deal socially, economically, relationally, physically, emotionally, ontologically, that it’s hard to believe that something so big and crazy is conveyed through such simple and roughshod means.

And society itself seems to be of two minds about it, arguing constantly that it’s no big deal and that it’s the biggest deal in the world. Although generally the split between the two arguments (regardless of who is making them) falls along the lines that it’s no big deal when it’s about me and what I want (and think is ok) and it’s a very big deal when it’s about you and what you want (and think is ok).

Even sides at apparent ideological extremes from one another are essentially both saying this, when you reduce their positions down far enough. Complete freedom and determination for myself and extreme judgment for and restraint from you is what everyone wants, they just don’t all agree on who “myself” is and what “myself” wants. And unless you’re taking for granted that your needs and desires are more valid than someone else’s, in a vacuum, that’s hard to argue.

We’re always ready to argue in favor of ourselves or behaviors we approve of that we consider favorable or “natural”. Whatever that means. Rape and slavery and cannibalism are perfectly natural, even among the animals. Especially among the animals, in fact. They’re just as natural and ubiquitous as all our other behaviors. And if we’re just animals, taking lessons from nature, there aren’t really any rules or boundaries, just more or less effective strategies.

In the natural world, success is its own justification. There’s no metaphysical rulebook to be laid on top on the universe, forbidding certain thoughts or denying approaches from consideration. Nature has no such rulebook. The existence of whole species is predicated on the assumption that some creatures are going to do very unpleasant things to other creatures (just spend some time reading about parasitoid wasps or about duck sexuality for a couple examples out of millions).

To put it simply, just because something is unpleasant for another creature doesn’t mean it isn’t natural, or even necessary for life. Competition and predation aren’t only natural, they’re the structure and energy driving complex life in our planet. They’re the reason we aren’t all just sea sponges blindly filtering gunk from the waves, as sponges have been doing, unchanged, for untold eons. Speculation about the reason for the explosion of complex life has recently focused on the development of sight, and through sight, potential for direct competition and predation, as the fire that started the biological arms race that ended in the world we see today.

If you can see, if your eyes are open, you know good and evil. You have the potential to do better or worse for yourself, and you can take action to walk down either path. You can gain or lose advantage. Intelligence increases opportunity, which increases competitiveness, which yields greater success. Intelligence is being able to see more, and faster, and see with your imagination as well as your eyes. Which yields even more success, which eventually yields more intelligence and more opportunities.

So we’re told. That’s the story of the natural sciences. And it’s a value-neutral story. It doesn’t tell us what should have happened, only what did. So an action or instinct that results in success and survives to be recorded by time, a strategy that is successful, doesn’t matter if it’s unpleasant or harmful for anyone else. All that matters is that it wins.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s get back to sexuality. I think from looking back and considering all that sex and the penis and semen mean to men, why they’re so obsessed with them is fairly obvious. On top of (or in support of) all the many complex factors that make sex matter for men, there’s this constant barrage of daily hormones telling them to care. There are systems operating on top of systems telling them the value of sex, tugging at their attention, demanding fulfillment.

And, at the same time that all this is happening, pushing them forward, there is a whole world of harsh realities and denials and selection pushing back against them, cutting half of them from the genetic history of our race, selecting against them, declaring them unworthy. Sex crowns many winners, but there are going to be a lot of losers, and they’re going to feel it keely. The system has a lot of built-in damage. It’s only the immense internal hormonal and psychological and emotional and social pressure that manages to drive men (and women) out of the (relatively) safe spaces of their own genders and into the arms of their judges and antagonists, reuniting these two halves of human race and their separate genetic lineages.

And yes, they are separate; the more we learn about genetics the more clear that becomes. The whole system of life and sex is built on that competition. It’s what made us exist, what made us what we are, what got us through the last hundred million years of history. Sex, as a biological reality, predates everything, except life itself and cellular specification (having distinct parts in a cell that do distinct things). It predates complex life itself. It’s the foundation of how our kind of life works.

So sex does matter. It’s the foundation of our means of existence. And it’s connected to every aspect of our existence. Our strengths and our vulnerabilities. Our hopes and our fears. And it’s a process that clearly comes with a lot of stakes and high pressure. Which is probably why it’s gone wrong so much. If you mess this up, you affect and endanger every aspect an an individual human’s life. You endanger their whole society, their part of the species across time. You can make yourselves spread across or disappear from history.

I’ve tried to confine myself here to talkingabout what I’ve learned from personal experience, from being a man. Women face similar situations, but with different circumstances and stakes. Sex is more of a literal danger for them. The natural result of sex is pregnancy. And pregnancy is difficult and often dangerous, and is at the least very consumptive of time and physical resources. It can be both unpleasant and dangerous. And that’s just pregnancy. Then the baby is born (also risky and painful) and then expects you to feed it for the next six months. And those are just the most basic physical demands that every baby puts on its mother (and largely exclusively).

As much as we might like to use the phrase “We are pregnant,” I can smoke and drink and go bungee jumping and even leave or die, and it won’t make any direct difference to the pregnancy. My wife is pregnant. It’s my baby, I take ownership. I have a social and emotional and causal connection that makes me do so and keeps me involved. But, strictly speaking, all I physically had to do was to ejaculate inside a woman. After that I could have been crushed by a falling piano and the pregnancy would still continue.

So at an absolute minimum, sex, penetration, allowing someone inside you, allowing them to leave part of themselves in you, has an enormous significance for a woman. It not only carries the meaning of everything that having a child might mean, it opens them up to enormous physical vulnerability (and likely social and economic vulnerability, because children require an enormous investment of time and money and effort). Access to her, for a woman, is just as precious a thing, and far more risky, as semen is for the man. And women have limited chances in their lives for viable pregnancies, a far far more limited window for having children (half that of a man’s), a limited supply of viable eggs, and each pregnancy and weaning consumes an enormous part of her total lifetime.

Men can churn out millions of new sperm every day, and given the opportunity could impregnate multiple women every day for seven decades. Theoretically, a single man could father tens of thousands of children in his lifetime at no personal cost except minimal regular effort and some electrolytes. And, to be honest, most men would feel pretty good about themselves if that was what the world wanted of them. Having your seed be desired and spread is an instinctive male desire, and it’s doesn’t really seem to have any reasonable limits.

In fact the reality of what men feel like they can or will or should do falls quite a bit short of what they really can do, in practice. When the haze of the must is on you, you feel like you could ride a girl all night, and you might talk a big game about filling them up and wanting to give them everything you’ve got. What you’ve actually got can usually be extracted with just a few minutes effort and amounts to maybe an ounce or so, a few sticky dribbles. And then you’re quite exhausted. We imagine ourselves as stallions, but the physical reality tends to be a bit more humble than our hormonal rages promise.

A lot of sexual fantasy plays to these exaggerations. Pornographic representation, whether recorded, written, or merely imagined, tends to play out these unrealistic promises. They play to tastes that are themselves often quite impractical and in real life would likely be problematic or actively unpleasant. Much as I like to be a fantastic lover, ten minutes of serious effort to please my wife, taking place after a hasty ejaculation on my part, can be a quite uncomfortable and herculean effort. People are heavy, and have poky bones, and sometimes it’s hard to breathe or reach in certain positions, and sometimes one or the other of you just isn’t on their game or isn’t at their best or isn’t really invested.

But in fantasy, all men are lovers of infinite energy with glorious penises the size of their arms that send women into ecstasy and orgasms at first entry, and emit fountains of cum that the women delight in taking inside themselves or upon themselves. And if you understand where men are coming from (sorry!), physically and psychologically, that makes perfect sense.

But, looking at it from a woman’s point of view, what is the number one thing she needs to be careful about, considering all the risks? We’ve focused on the physical risks so far, but pregnancy brings a huge host of other risks if you start adding in all the aspects of complex behavior that exist in human society and social relationships. What if he takes all the family’s money to drink or to buy drugs? What if he gets the family involved in legal troubles? Both of those are, statistically, enormous risks, and surprisingly common. The criminal population is overwhelmingly male, and an enormous amount of men worldwide in many countries drink or otherwise selfishly fritter away their family’s wealth. Even if he’s not a criminal, what if he’s emotionally and relational distant, or even violent? What if he’s just a poor contributor to the family? What if he gets involved with someone else and shifts his attention to a different family?

These are all very realistic risks. Not that mothers aren’t risky prospects in their own ways, too, but men overall are far more variant in their behavior and outcomes, and you can see that in statistics of everything from economics to prison populations to suicide to genetics (remember that 50% ancestry difference?) to parenting statistics to life expectancy. There are a lot of men doing amazing things, and there are a lot of men absolutely crashing and burning. They represent a higher wager, a higher risk and reward approach to life, and occupy the majority of the extremes at both ends of the spectrum (extreme success and catastrophic failure). Partly because they are just more willing to go all in and risk everything on a strategy. And women, generally, have been shown to take a more balanced, wholistic approach to life choice that manages both costs and benefits in a more measured manner.

And when you look at men’s mating strategies and mating structures of risk and reward, that makes perfect sense as a general trend. Men are risking far less of themselves in mating, but have to risk more to qualify for mating, to prove themselves worthy of conveying that risk to their mate, to seem like a safe bet. Women risk far more in mating, but they need to do far less and risk far less to qualify for it; their greatest danger is balancing the pressure of the shorter amount of time they have (and smaller pool of viable mates) against how selective they feel they need to be to justify taking the risk. Women are like mutual funds. Men are like venture capital.

But women only have half the time window to make their investment decisions. And men have less time to reap the rewards (thanks to shorter lifespans). A recent survey of all mammal species revealed that males live a collectively 20% shorter lifespan than females. That’s a really big difference. It’s enormous. It’s shocking that, simply by being born male, in any mammal species, you have one out of every five days ahead of you taken away. Or maybe it’s more cheerful to reflect that all females get an extra bonus day of life for every four. That kind of universal data should tell you something about the differences between the sexes and the different kinds of pressures on them.

So, considering that men are laboring under an intense internal pressure to prove themselves and to compete, and tend more toward extremes in many areas, and the primary obstacle to their biological imperative to mate is selection, proving themselves worthy, earning access, earning the right to be part of the far narrower slice of humanity that advances as male ancestors to the human race, considering that women almost universally will not marry a man who is shorter or less successful or lower status than themselves, and women are the gatekeepers of that affirmation that men crave, what results should we expect?

Whew!

Well, pursuit and worship of the idea of availability, for one. Frustration, for another. A desire for more control over their destiny and needs that may translate into trying trying to control others. Resentment. And, thanks to men’s higher levels of risk taking and aggression, more extreme behaviors as a result of that frustration and resentment.

Women actually have been shown to be as likely to engage in abuse as men, and engage in self abuse and attempt suicide far more than men (which may also correlate with their higher average levels of negative emotion and dissatisfaction). But when men do do any of those things, they go way further. They attempt suicide far less but succeed far more, and far more violently. Their acts of aggression toward others, both women and men, are far more likely to result in injuries. If you go merely by the most extreme results, serious injury and death, man are doing much worse than women. But that’s not the whole picture, because men and women don’t act the same in such situations.

So there’s a very high cost to being men, in general. There are also high potential benefits. But men are a riskier bet. And the world knows that; women know that. And they’re understandably reluctant to just give men a pass and assume they’re good enough. They want to approve men, they’re frustrated too and have their own needs and desires they wish were getting met. They have their own pressures. Women are just as frustrated with men’s failure to be what they want them to be (or for being what they are) as men are frustrated with women’s failure to be what they want them to be (and being what they are). We’re all a bit frustrated with one another and wish the other side could conform a bit more to our way of thinking and be a bit more like us. But how the sexes are actually makes sense for a thousand different reasons, and has an immense, unbroken history in our species and beyond, so we shouldn’t hold our breaths for the theoretical eradication of human sexual nature in all its long established biological, psychological, and social aspects.

Sex, so the naturalists tell us, and I mentioned earlier, is more foundational to life than multi-cellular organisms. It’s the foundation of complex life on Earth. And it’s at least fairly unlikely that something that took five hundred million years to build and has sustained life for five hundred million years will suddenly up and go in a couple decades just because we’ve noticed some of the downsides to it. A species that forgets how to be what it is and how sex works wouldn’t be a problem for nature. Its members would simply die off, and whatever was left that still knew how to follow the game would simply fill the void and replace them. It’s a self-resolving problem.

That probably sounds bit callous, but nature is a bit callous. It isn’t particularly interested in how we wish the world worked, only in how it does work. So nature doesn’t mind requiring turtles to lay 1000 eggs because it expects all but one of those babies to die before they can become adults. Nature doesn’t bat an eye at that. If it takes a thousand failed attempts to get just one runner across the finish line, then that’s what it takes.

Unfortunately for humans, we’re able to be aware of our precarious situation. We’re able to feel that selective pressure bearing down on us. Our years of fertility wasting away, our chances of being chosen dwindling. We become aware that we might become losers in the great race. And that’s a pretty hard thing to face.

And so, naturally, if we do not merely explode or implode in our frustration and resentment, we seek ways to alleviate our distress and meet our needs. And we do some pretty crazy things as a result. Because we all know on some level the pain and the need and pressure that hangs over us, and that modern life and society haven’t exactly made easier (much as we like to pretend that it has). Statistically, people are having less sex, not more, as the structures that defined how to follow along and participate in and succeed in the dance withered and fell away, and the pools of viable mating prospects shrank more and more.

I read a very long, very interesting article all about this. By a reporter doing a long-form study of sex, who expected to find quite the opposite result in the new culture of sexual freedom, but found instead a proliferation of counter-productive habits and behaviors (pornography addiction, sexual violence, insecurity, extreme fetishes) that made finding a mate much harder, as well as just a general uncertainty about what sex even was or what it meant or how to connect with people of another sex. Young people she interviewed seemed even more afraid of and disappointed in and confused by the other sex than ever. And that’s seemed a very unusual and interesting fact to the reporter.

Where she expected to hear about all the opportunities that the removal of social barriers and increases in sexual safety (through contraception and STD prevention and treatment) had created, she instead found people who were afraid to approach someone of the other sex except through the contractual understanding of an app, and who admitted that most of their activity on those apps was either fruitless or very disheartening and negative. She found herself talking again and again with girls confused about how to handle boys who thought they would react positively to being choked during sex, or would be eager to try anal sex, or would get excited by being roughly spanked. And many of the young men were simply too scared and disheartened to even bother trying, preferring to retreat into the much simpler, more easily accessible pleasures of pornography, video games, drugs, sex dolls, and the like.

People can’t stop being people, so if they can’t get something they feel they need, they’ll find a substitute. But for something that connects to so much of us and has such far reaching ties to our history, past, present, future, society, health, identity, emotions, security, and opportunities, it’s not that easy to just swap in an alternative. At the very least, it’s hard not to do so without suffering some downstream consequences.