A lot of what men and women provide for each other is intangible. It might be a feeling, a general assessment of our psychological position in the universe. Provision and security, identity, and status are all a big part of this feeling. For men, sexual insecurity is a very big concern. In order to be able to turn down opportunities and invest in their current relationships, as well as to maintain stability and focus, men rely on the sense that their sexual situation is secure.
I’ve often had my wife ask me what I wanted for Christmas, birthdays, Father’s Day, etc. And I’ve often equivocated. I don’t need anything, I don’t want anything. I don’t require any special treatment or celebration. It’s OK, I don’t need it, I don’t need to be celebrated or honored or require any generosity. Unlike all humans ever, and like most dads always, I don’t really need anything.
What’s under that appearance that I’m covering up? What is it that I really do need? There’s really only one thing I want, and it’s not the sort of thing I’m able to bring up easily. My wife is a little prudish and has some psychological hangups about sex and about her own body, and she isn’t naturally very physically affectionate with anyone, which makes talking about the subject more difficult. And her own physical body in general isn’t one of her biggest interests (except maybe when it comes to exciting and exotic food. She’s very driven and very focused on the things she’s doing and working on or enjoying, and they tned to be very subject-focused or self-focused and are often very creative or abstract. They aren’t aimed at other people around her. She’s a creative intellectual. I’m not a job or a project, and I’m not a hobby or interest. So my body isn’t the object of greatest personal interest for her. And some of that is my own doing, I’m not exactly Mr Universe, but even I was it wouldn’t be that big a deal to her, or to many married middle aged women.
In the plethora of ways that our lives intersect, deliberate affection aimed toward or received from another person ranks lower than other concerns in her hierarchy of aims. It doesn’t rank as nothing, but it’s merely one priority among many others. It is far from monolithic. But as much as I appreciate my wife on many levels and share so much in common with her and chose her specifically based on and. For her intellect and creativity, for me this area looms toweringly large.
The greatest thing, the nearest and dearest desire of my heart that I’ve ever wished for as a special dispensation and gift from her, is sexual security. For me, that would mean knowing that I would get to have sex twice a week forever. For me, that would be the gold standard of security. I wouldn’t have to worry or obsess. I wouldn’t have to starve, wouldn’t have to feel that gnawing, burning need. Sure, I can imagine even more as a kind of pleasurable fantasy, but what I have in mind, what really sustains a man, is security. I don’t think women view sex through that lens. But then, a lot of women don’t experience sex similarly to men. Their pathways are different, even though they’re through the same territory.
Men and women both have orgasms, both have arousal, both have stimulation, both have post-coital phases. But they’re not quite the same and don’t work quite the same. On average, they’re massively different. The need for sex in men is like a literal hunger. In fact it’s more appropriate to compare it to holding your breath. I believe that’s a closer analogy.
Try this. Hold your breath and wait. The longer you wait, the more you feel that burning, that urgency. Try to go about your normal business while you’re doing it. Observe the effects on all your other habits and actions. They become a bit frantic or a bit aimless. Try to complete some of your ordinary daily tasks. It’s pretty hard, isn’t it? You either do them badly from distraction or wildly because of the burning within.
Now try holding your breath for painfully long periods of time on a regular basis during an entire day. So that feeling keeps coming back, so you’re only existing in rafts of peace between oceans of burning deprivation. Now try it for a week. How do you like that, as a general condition for living? That is exactly how it feels to be a man. That is what the sex drive feels like. It’s not wonder it makes us a little crazy, a little desperate. We’re drowning here. We feel like we’re going to die.
So you can see why the idea of sexual security has real power for men, why it fills a real need. That’s the sort of compelling, tangible good that men would be willing to give a lot up for and go a long way to secure. That’s valuable.
If you raise the difficult question, why would men be willing to get married, you can imagine all sorts of answers. Yes, two people working together are effective and complement one another in powerful ways. Yes, it makes sense for the distribution of labor in the face of overwhelming demands. Yes, it’s good for raising children. Yes, it gives you some social standing and means you’re more likely to have someone there in your old age.
But those are insufficient answers when it comes to motivating young adults, who tend to look at things in a more present, narrow, impulsive, and self-centered manner. In the old days you were dealing with teens to twenties, not a group well-known for their long-term, considered approach to life. Those sorts of benefits are something that you come to appreciate as you go through marriage, not what pulls you into it. Those are the nutritional benefits of the apple, not the shiny red skin that makes you reach for it.
What pulls you into marriage is sex. And now that sex no longer requires marriage, fewer and fewer young people are bothering with it. It makes a weak case for itself, especially among the young. And the question stands, (because I’m a man and that’s what I’m looking at) why should men in particular make the bargain that marriage demands? What do you get out of marriage as an arrangement that you don’t get out of other arrangements?
Marriage is a kind of bargain between men and women, a complex and long-term contract, an agreement, an alliance, a merger, an exchange, an economy. It’s fairly easy to see why women might desire it, especially in the days before effective birth control. Women are in greater need of securing protection and provision for their situation, if they’re going to be producing young, which in the old days you spent a lot of your adult life doing. And if you didn’t; no more humans, your culture and your legacy ceased to exist. So it was important work. But it required certain provisions.
You need someone to keep the threats away and bring back food when you can’t easily leave the nest. And men were particularly good at that sort of thing. So women desired a certain kind of sexual security. Security that allowed them to open up and flower.
Sex itself as a physical act, for women, has certain similar needs and parallels. It’s much harder for women to have good sex without an attached, invested, secure, understanding partner. Women’s ability to experience pleasure is much more dependent on removing obstacles, anxieties, and other psychological brakes than men’s is. It’s also more complex and decentralized and multi-dimensional. Even their physiology is.
Men’s ability to be aroused and experience pleasure is mostly dependent on accelerants. A pleasing visual display is the most powerful of these, but there are others. The visual sense is so incredibly sensitive that for some men, especially young and sexually deprived men, visual stimulation may be all that is necessary to carry them from arousal right through to orgasm. Even men who aren’t currently experiencing that kind of sensitivity can certainly understand it.
But you won’t easily find the same understanding among the female sex. Just try to imagine, as a woman, what it would be like to find the visual experience of the other sex that stimulating. Crazy, yes? Try placing that alongside the breath-holding experiment and you start to get a picture of some of the curiosities that make up being a man.
But to return to my question, if desire for sex is what drives men into marriage, if they’re seeking some kind of sexual security, which I believe they are, why consent to marriage to get it, or in what way does marriage uniquely provide it? After all, men don’t need those other types of security and familiarity to achieve pleasure that I mentioned. They’re notoriously easy to please, even for a stanger. Heck, even just a close approximation of a woman, like a picture or a doll or even certain inanimate objects will do in a pinch, with minimal effort. Sexual satisfaction, as a man, is easy to get. At least in terms of orgasms, and men’s sexual experience and physiological and neurological design is structured around them.
Does that mean that marriage is really just a woman’s game? A way to capture men in an exchange that, as long as they maintain their cartel on their sexual favors, will secure an equivalent exchange for them and get them the kind of sexual security and pleasure they want and need? And if the power of the cartel that demands men exchange one kind of sexual security for another is broken forever by declining (or non-existent) demands for marriage terms as a condition for sex on the part of women, plus the near-enough alternatives of porn and simulated sex existing as nearly-free alternatives, what hope does marriage have as an institution?
The most obvious answer is, very little. Without a monopoly on sex, women lose much of their bargaining power, and life reverts to a state more closely resembling polygynous cultures, where a few men will get all the sex but won’t have to commit to any single partner, and a whole lot more men won’t have sex with anyone (or only with cheaper substitutes), and women who do want sexual security on something approximating marital terms will have to deal with far more competition and compromises. Increased male violence also tends to be a side effect of polygyny, a consequence of mating insecurity.
Porn and artificial sex may help to blunt this effect. But men feel the pressure of biological selection knocking on their door, their own version of the ticking biological clock, except for them it isn’t a clock so much as a sorting machine. There’s a good chance, from an evolutionary standpoint a much greater chance than for women, that they will be selected out of the gene pool and be a zero. Their position is fundamentally insecure and competitive, and so they compete and they strive to secure their position. And if they feel pretty certain they’re going to lose under the current system, their instinct is to overthrow and upset and attack that system, and everyone in it. And that’s bad for social stability.
Both males and females are fighting to secure satisfactory mating opportunities. For women the limiting question is, how long do you have to make that selection, and so how choosy can you be? For men the limiting question is, what are your competitive possibilities? How able are you to you merit being selected, and who can you get to choose you? Both sexes want to maximize their answers to those questions. Women are in a race against narrowing options and a closing window of opportunity, and men are in a race for expanding options and increasing the window of opportunity. So they’re both fighting for the he same fight, but with reversed starting points and trajectories.
Marriage is more than just an individual contract, though, it’s a social contract. It’s a way of structuring relationships in a society. It’s not only intended to resolve individual desires, it’s intended to address systemic issues. It’s a game within a larger game. Polygynous societies are highly competitive, have rampant inequality, and are riddled with jealousy and violence. In fact young men react so instinctively to economic inequality, which for them translates into reduced or unequal mating opportunities, that it is a major predictive factor for violence.
I could go on for quite a while about the individual advantages of marriage over other options, but the truth is that all those options exist within the framework of a larger society and mating market. And there’s not much benefit to me in avoiding the limitations and copromises of marriage if the polygynous structure of the larger society means that my overall opportunities have collapsed. In a system where everyone else is following the rules, there’s an advantage to being the free rider who doesn’t. But in a system with no rules, there’s no advantage to be conferred.
And that’s one of the big advantages marriage offers over a deregulated, polygynous society. Each man has a greater overall chance of having a mate, because each man, no matter how high-status, can only easily monopolize a single mate. Of course some very high-status men and the women who desire them will find ways around this, but it won’t be nearly as easy, it will be contained. It will exist at the edges, not at the center, of the mating market. The majority of the market will deal with with the general demographic rule of one man per woman, and both men and women will make their respective peace with it. Women will have to accept the limitations to their selection, and men will have to accept the limitations to their opportunities. Both end up having to confine some of their fundamental sexual instincts, but in return most people end up getting most of what they want, and you avoid all the chaos and violence and mate instability and inequality of the unregulated market, where in fact the majority of men, far from getting everything, get nothing, and the majority of women, far from securing the best mates, find that those mates have no incentive to be tied down.
The great irony of the unregulated mating market is that it delivers exactly the opposite of thing it promises and that motivates it. Without marriage, most men get less real sex and most women get fewer real partners. We give up what we have as a stable, fairly equitable opportunity for most everyone in the hope that deregulation will let us be the one lucky winner in the chaos. Which is why marriage is a social, not merely an individual, concern. But this is certainly a benefit that would do real good for plenty of individuals. Do we really want to satisfy ourselves with peon and robots? Even if they make a pretty decent appearance of the real thing, and even if they’re dedicated to giving us what we want? Ia that really going to make of us and of our society what we want to be? Is that really the best use for the innate sexual incentive? To be merely pacified by technology?
Porn provides a facsimile or illusion of sexual security. A limited illusion. It avoids a lot of the complexities and difficulties, which seems nice. But it also degrades its verisimilitude. And you just can’t assume that the only benefit of mating, the only part of it that provides satisfaction, is the orgasm. Sex makes you feel complex things about yourself. And sex really is more than just penetration and orgasm. It’s nested in a much larger, connected experience. Can porn give you children? Can porn go with you to the beach and sit next to you and make you feel special because it’s clear that they’re there with you and for you and chose you, which says something about you? Can it make you feel like a king? Can porn look back on a lifetime of memories and accomplishments and struggles together? Can porn snuggle up close to you to keep warm at night? Can it surprise you? Can it be your friend? You traded all those things away for it, is porn really giving you the full spectrum of risk and reward that mating promises? Or is it just a cheap, easy, short-term fix to the need? A need whose fulfillment has become less and less likely the more that porn and sexual deregulation take hold.
Marriage isn’t a perfect solution to your individual problem of sexual insecurity. But it is the best systemic solution for male sexual insecurity. It might seem like complete license would be, but in practice it isn’t, because you get get outcompeted and outselected. For men and women, it breeds a host of losers and very few winners. It’s a conundrum. Discipline generates freedom, and limitation generates opportunity. A wife might not be a perfect solution to male sexual insecurity, it’s just the best solution. It’s also the most complete, durable, and multi-dimensional solution.
As a man, you need more than just an orgasm. You need a place in history, a connection to the future and the past, a role in society. You need so many more things than an orgasm can offer you. Even orgasms have a purpose. That’s when men get their primary dose of oxytocin. It’s when you get the rush of neurochemicals that are trying to bind you and connect you and invest you in someone. They’re trying to make you see this one person as more beautiful than they are, more beautiful than all others, to invest. You have these raging hormones and testosterone, and there’s meant to be someone there to respond to them and modulate them and regulate them into stability and productivity, and losing that someone causes them to surge again until they can find a new home. These are all effects we can see in scientific study.
It’s easy to romanticize a kind of hunter-gatherer mentality over an agricultural mentality. The excitement the chase papers over the fact of what an unstable and short and difficult life it is, spending all your time and effort in the pursuit and bringing down of the prey. It’s easy to fall for that stimulating image, and not see the cost and the way it traps you at a tribal level of endless struggle, never progressing, caught forever in the moment of the hunt, and the vast sea of failure that floats beneath all such efforts. Most hunts end in failure. Creating easier and easier prey with less and less nutritional value won’t make a greater hunter out of you.
The agricultural mentality lacks some of the drama of the hunter-gatherer story, but it also mitigates the problems of endemic failure, violence, inequality, and lack of progress. It makes a new kind of story possible, and far more and far longer and more complex stories. That’s why marriage is an emergent, evolved solution. And it’s why rejecting it is slowly pulling us backward into a more primitive and unstable and less civilized (not more) social state. Men are becoming more like animals and less and less useful engines or tools for civilization, and women are finding it harder to maintain the structure of civilization and order. And the whole system is becoming more dependent on stopgaps and technological band-aids and handouts and assistance and governmental interventions.
Marriage had this advantage, that it was a powerful social technology that was essentially available to everyone. It could be possessed and exploited and administered by individual couples. It didn’t depend nearly as much on other people and other things, on external social or material technologies. We possessed it innately. We could bring it with us into the wilderness and make a kingdom of it. It made kings and queens of us, sovereign miniature societies and economies, with all the functions of a state in miniature. We had an army, a social safety net, complimentary political and economic interests; we had a culture, a shared history, a joint future; we had investments and development projects.
Is there a sacrifice involved in settling down in one place, one territory, and taking a cultivation approach to our lives, instead of a wandering, hunting approach? Yes. Everything is a tradeoff. But look what it bought. The cultivation mindset, the acceptance of limits and discipline, makes everything we enjoy possible it generates civilization. Marriage is a foundational concept that helps make it possible. We haven’t outgrown the need for it, which seems to be the idea today. If we embrace the values of the hunter gatherers we will begin to live like hunter gatherers. It make take a while for the benefits of marriage and an agriculturalist society to run down, to be slowly eroded, and in fact the upper classes, despite their popular rhetoric are remarkably conservative in practice in this area.
For all that they romanticize the hunter-gatherer life, they know that their own security and success depends on living like agriculturalists and largely stick to it. But over time those benefits wear down and the instability grows, especially among the lower classes, who have fewer external social and technological protections to blunt the effects of losing their innate human technology of marriage. Their lives are already descending back into the world of the hunter-gatherer. Opportunistic, uncertain, unequal, hypercompetitive, violent, seeking short-term solutions to long-term insecurities.
In the end, machines produce that which they are designed to produce. The hunter-gatherer approach produces a certain kind of society. One that isn’t well-adapted to the populous, complex, interconnected, long-horizoned world we have built. Marriage is a kind of bargain, a devil’s bargain, maybe. One we make with and against ourselves and the other sex and society and the world itself. It’s not perfect because we aren’t perfect. And the goal of your desires isn’t necessarily to give you everything you want (most of your desires would ruin you if that were possible), but to drive you toward what you need. To compel you to make the most reasonable bargains for their fulfillment that you can.
Your need for sexual security, as dreadful as that need can be, doesn’t exist to punish you or to blindly fulfill you. It exists to give you an incentive, and yes, even to give the object of your desire an advantage over you, so they will have something to negotiate with. We weren’t designed as singular entities. We were designed for one another, to be embedded in one another, in the world of our many needs and capacities, our connections across and backward and forward through time. You don’t win that game by avoiding it or circumventing it or trying to trick yourself into thinking you’ve won. You have to play the game. For better or worse. Till death parts us.
Our problem today isn’t that we’ve liberated sex or that we hold it in so high a regard. It’s that we’ve trivialized it and trivialized our own needs. We’ve trivialized what sex does for us and for our whole civilization. It brings our seperated species back together. It lifts us out of our tribal struggles and makes kingdoms out of us. It reintegrates us, it empowers us, it civilizes us, it transforms us, it makes us useful. We haven’t freed it; we’ve lost it and let it disperse, holding on to only the smallest part of it, a reductionism of its meaning and power. We’ve lost the founding mythology of our civilization, the king and queen among the gods.
These may be small things, and maybe marriage and a cultivation mindset are too high a price to pay for sexual and civilizational security. Maybe people would rather take their chances in the open plain and the hunt. I’m not unaware of the costs of marriage. But I’m also not unaware of the benefits, nor of the actual costs of the hunt. And we each reap the costs and benefits of whatever bargain we make. That’s living.
Making Nobody Happy 