Desire for sex

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Saint, Aug 10, 2016.

  1. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    Even the word "cheat" biases any discussions?
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    957
    Interesting reading

    "How Many Sexes? How Many Genders?
    When Two Are Not Enough
    A. H. Devor, Ph.D.
    Sociology Department
    University of Victoria, Canada


    [..Concluding comments]
    What all of these people have taught me is that the time is upon us to re-evaluate how we think about gender, sex, and sexuality. It now seems perfectly clear to me that we live in a world which is far more diverse than any number of simplistic dichotomies can describe. I have become convinced that not only can men and women live in bodies of any sex, but that we, as a society, go against reality when we insist that there are only two genders, only two sexes, and only slight variations on two basic sexualities. I have learned from speaking with transgendered and transsexed people that we diminish ourselves as a society by failing to avail ourselves of the special gifts and lessons we can receive from the transgendered, transsexed and intermediately sexed people among us."
    https://web.uvic.ca/~ahdevor/HowMany/HowMany.html
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    957
    Because that is what they have been taught to do. They have been promised a happy life and picket fences if they stay between the lines. But in fact marriage is a 50/50 toss of a coin. And many who stay married are still miserable.

    I'm not defending cheating and never cheated on anyone. But people are raised with certain expectation and it can take lifetime to shake off the bonds.

    You are only considering traditional western cultures. For example, it takes a village... There are many kinds of families and they aren't all The Brady Bunch. The pretense of happy families has always been exaggerated, in fact it was sterilized and marketed by popular television. We know people were miserable because when finally given a chance to bolt, when divorce became legal and acceptable, the family unit often failed. Since then we have seen divorce rates in the US as high as 55%. Now it is dropping a bit but mainly because fewer people are getting married or they wait until later in life.

    What has really opened my eyes is the attitude of young people. They see parents and grandparents who sometimes all divorced and hate each other. They see no logical evidence that marriage is the path to a happy life. So they are rejecting the notion of total commitment entirely. Lucky for me, this makes older men more attractive to young women because they aren't thinking in terms of marriage. Currently, I am seeing a young women who has a regular girlfriend. And yes we all plan to get together soon.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    I was hedging but my gf has been pushing the idea. It is completely within their domain of normal.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. wellwisher Banned Banned

    Messages:
    5,160
    The brain aspect, as you call it, is connected to what I call the carrot on the stick; blind desire, that leads to the prime directive of reproduction. If there is reward or pleasure, associated with an object or activity, many people will follow that carrot, without regards to where it takes them. Drugs are a nice shiny carrot on a string for many people.

    Let me give a different example of an instinct that works the same way. Say highly fatty foods taste really good to me; deep fried lard balls covered in bacon grease. Culture, via medicine says eating too much fatty food is not good for my health. I am modern and progressive, so I call this old fashion, and blame my desire to eat deep fried lard balls, on my brain's natural wiring. Does this justification make the lard balls healthy for me?

    This is the alternate sexuality argument in a nut shell. The alternate does not work toward the prime directive, but rather it follows the carrot on the string and calls that a new prime directive. Everyone else has to defend that position or be called phobic.

    In the case of eating, the real prime directive behind eating is to satisfy the energy and health needs of the body. The carrot on the string is connected to all the pleasant flavors we are consciously aware of, connected to food. We know, from science, not all foods, even if pleasant and even obsessively preferred, will meet that need of the prime directive of energy and health. We may decide to take out chance in terms of the allowing the conscious secondary, to replace the unconscious primary. But this is not natural.

    The husband and wife is very close to the natural prime directive; reproduction and child raising. This set up may not be the best carrot on a string, especially after a couple of children and when they no longer have all the time and affection for each other. Their staying together serves the needs of the prime directive; needs of children. Problems will arise because of cheating. This is where a secondary subroutine; pleasure, takes the place of the primary, so one can believe that eating lard balls is no longer a health concern. This will often lead to a split up and strain on the children; emotional heart attack.
     
  8. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    How so? If the terms are monogamy, the terms are monogamy. If one violates the terms, what would you like us to call that violation?

    The question of cheating only comes up if the partners have agreed to rules including exclusivity.

    Get rid of that rule and cheating becomes defined on a case by case basis according to the terms established.

    • • •​

    Yes, no, and some aspect of calling bullshit. That is, to the one, we are in fact considering a limited range of contexts, but, to the other, that's also inherent in the discussion.

    For instance, the issue you raised in #19―

    Some men and women seem to be driven to serial cheating and we assign a moral judgment on that. But perhaps it is just natural for some and these people are trying to fight their basic nature.

    ―attends this context.

    If you wish to discus other manners of familial relationship ... well, right; I'm certain such propositions have their valid and relevant aspects. It's not a matter of objecting or protesting or anything like that. But it does seem an odd change of subject.

    And, you know, the only "problem"―if we want to call it that―about the attitude of the young people in the general context you've noted is that the old paradigm of marriage is expressed very poorly. There are reasons, for instance, the counterpoint suggesting marriage is about ownership of women exists. In truth, though, the "ownership of women" is symptomatic. Marriage, in that older "traditional" context, wasn't about love, romance, empowerment, and all that. It was a networking function. Stephanie Coontz's thesis, colloquially expressed, that the primary purpose of marriage is to create "networks of in-laws" (6) is, in fact, the only genuinely consistent effect of marriage throughout its recognizable existence.

    Beyond that, the aesthetics have been pretty much awful. Consider, please, that while American traditionalists weep and gnash and dream of a Golden Age from the Long Decade―Ozzie & Harriet and Leave it to Beaver are a bit more typical than the groundbreaking Brady Bunch―the traditionalists of the Long Decade wept and gnashed and dreamed of a paradigm predating the Roaring Twenties and flapper liberation. We should not be surprised, then, that Coontz also notes, pretty much at the outset (1-2), that questions she had been hearing from "reporters and audiences" about constant discourse suggesting decline or crisis about the institution of marriage, "seemed to assume that there had been some Golden Age of Marriage in the past". It turns out that pretty much every generation looks at marriage that way, all the way back to Greece and Rome, at least. "The European settlers in America", Coontz writes, "began lamenting the decline of family and the disobedience of women and children almost as soon as they stepped off the boats." She also pointed to sociologist Amy Kaler:

    Worrying about the decay of marriage isn't just a Western habit. In the 1990s, sociologist Amy Kaler, conducting interviews in a region of souther Africa where divorce has long been common, was surprised to hear people say that marital strife and instability were new to their generation. So Kaler went back and looked at oral histories collected fifty years earlier. She found that the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people she was interviewing in the 1990s had also described their own marital relations as much worse than the marriages of their parents' and grandparents' day. "The invention of a past filled with good marriages," Kaler concluded, is one way people express discontent about other aspects of contemporary life.

    Perhaps that will be a transformation we might eventually distill in the historical record. In the U.S., we have been struggling with a threshold whereby either latter Generation X, or Generation Y in general, will be the first American generation to definitively fare less well than their parents, or some approximately similar expression. It's emblematic, and bugs the hell out of Americans. But what if what you're pointing to represents a transformation of, or at the very least, a powerful twist on the historical trend? What if this is a generation with no "golden age" of marriage to recall?

    The young people today are coming up in a time when, in the U.S., at least, the grown-ups have spent the last twenty-five years in a furious fight about marriage and sexual behavior that really does sound proprietary. It's been a disgraceful show the entire time. My generation? My political conscience developed during what Susan Faludi describes as the backlash against feminism in the eighties. And it's true, I remember it that way, too: "Women's lib" was a derogatory term, and we men wanted to be seen as ultimately generous for finally giving women permission to work outside the house and say no to sexual intercourse.

    It's hard to say we're at the height of the backlash, because things can still get louder and more dangerous. But, yeah, the young people today are coming up amid a brutal dispute over marriage and societal roles, and nothing about this makes marriage sound like anything other than an asset disposition. I can see why it isn't an attractive prospect.

    Actually, Coontz's book is really good; released eleven years ago, it seems to have taken until, oh, say, September last↱ before anyone fighting the Gay Fray actually noticed.

    You know, I admit that since coming out and acknowledging openly that women's sexual behavior is generally irrelevant to me as an individual―the difference is a matter of knowing I'm gay versus thinking gay, which is about as closely as I can explain it without a massive digression―your point no longer makes sense to me in a way that it used to. That is, I get what you're saying insofar as I can remember thinking similar formulations, but those formulations seem objectifying in a way that really stands out to me, now. Still, though, that's no longer my world, so maybe it's not supposed to make sense to me, anymore.

    It also occurs to me this might because my role in gay congress is different from my role in the heteroseuxal version. To wit, it occurs to me that while I remember the phrase, "Robbing the cradle", I have exactly no idea what the word is for a "gay cougar". Technically, the law is my only age cutoff, but come on, really? The thought of seducing the nineteen year-old up the street ... honestly, it just leads to thoughts of the seventy-six million complications I can't possilby imagine right now. And, you know, as many women will remind, just because he's got a dick doesn't mean he knows what to do with it.

    These paragraphs are a digression, of course, but what am I supposed to do with a line like that? For whatever it's worth, the transformation of my lust has been an astounding process to witness. The thought that it's possible? When I was trying to get my dick into a woman, maybe I would have decided to pursue. But when you're the receiving partner? I can't tell you how much of what I learned in passing got blown out of the water once I started working the metaphorical math from my proper station.

    Couldn't tell you what it means to my former hetrosexual self, since that person never quite existed. But, yeah, now that it feels right, I can only seem to comprehend certain things I used to feel and at least pretend to believe as if I'm examining historical relics, things that are disconnected from me.

    At any rate, the future is as the future will. What remains unwrit depends on the hands that write the tale.

    Here's a fun one: Imagine Brave New World penned in the twenty-first century? What if Lenina being pneumatic just isn't enough, and the problem is that Bernard needs her to learn how to deliver a fist? Orgy porgy, Ford and fun; fist the boys and make them One.

    I wonder what the young people today will say when it's their turn to say stuff about the young people today?
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.
     
    Last edited: Aug 12, 2016
  9. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    957
    The failing I see in that argument is this: We need people. We need human touch. Without we start to shrivel up and die. We have been tuned not only biologically for reproduction, but also psychologically. That it was originally directed at reproduction is irrelevant. The need for sex is now in our nature. Most of us crave it. A teenage boy may be all but consumed with it constantly. I know I was. I was just an erection with legs. This is not to say we should act irresponsibly. But the desire is not like craving a cigarette or heroin. It is fundamental to our nature and well being. I have read many psychology articles and papers discussing happiness. A healthy sex life is often right at the top of the list of things that help.
     
  10. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    957
    The original motivation was the notion that they have been led by a carrot right into a lifestyle contradictory to their nature. This because they have been taught and we have historically judged that their nature is morally flawed be they married or not.

    Historically, marriage was driven more out of practical needs that as a whole no longer exist. In fact the notion of romantic love being the foundation of marriage is a fairly recent paradigm.

    The notion of objectification is interesting. All sexual partners objectify each other. We all objectify people around us every day. The key is whether objectification is the extent by which another person is appreciated. I can appreciate a woman as a person, friend or lover, but also as a sexual being. I can still get turned on by her femaleness without ceasing to appreciate her as a person.

    The big leap of thinking for me was that not all rewarding relationships must have a extended future or be rooted in love. We can appreciate being together today and let tomorrow take care of tomorrow. The fact is that romantic love generally doesn't last long in any marriage and it wasn't the basis for marriage historically. Almost all relationships boil down to other forms of love and appreciation, or satisfy some practical need. Practical need is the real foundation of marriage historically.

    As for chasing the young beauties, who am I to deny millions of years of evolution?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    I am what I am. I'm a hetero man.
     
  11. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    Did I actually write "know" instead of "no"?

    Apparently I did.

    (groan ....)
     
  12. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    Ain't nobody's perfect, not even you Tiassa
     
  13. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    957
    Haha, I get dangerous when it gets late - alien finger syndrome, or even worse, Freudian finger slips.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  14. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,985
    Dont ya hate it when ya send an email an then discover it had an idiotic typo.!!!
     
  15. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    957
    When it comes to morality plays, I think we men have been sold a bill of goods. This is especially obvious when an older man starts chasing younger women. A few older women who know me [a couple of family members and one other] constantly try to convince me that I'm not happy. When am I going to settle down and marry some nice woman my age? WTF!!! I'm happier than I've ever been in my adult life but it doesn't matter what I say or how much my life has improved.

    It doesn't matter that I have completely turned my life around in every say. It doesn't matter that I was slowly dying. They always ignore that and start challenging everything I say. In fact, they completely ignore the facts and go on their merry way. Instead they want me to jump right back into same crap that drove me to put a gun to my head. Yet when I was suicidal I was completely alone. Why? I am convinced the answer is, they can't handle the truth. Expectations of men have been driven so deep into their brain, that they cannot imagine that a man needs more than their little worlds allow.

    Beware of people who claim to only have your best interest at heart.

    If I sound bitter, I guess I am. Any time someone calls and starts working me it pisses me off. I thought these people cared about me. I no longer believe that is true. And I now see this a part of a wider pattern of abuse or control in my family, that explains how I ended up where I did, and why I married who I married. I was duped. Since then I have seen the same pattern in countless other men - the walking dead [like I was]. I am not unique... except perhaps in the fact that I hit bottom but I'm still alive. How many men are just waiting to die, like I was?
     
    Last edited: Aug 13, 2016
  16. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    I once wrote a song about "teeny bopper butt".
     
  17. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    957
    • Men die by suicide 3.5x more often than women.
    • On average, there are 117 suicides per day.
    • White males accounted for 7 of 10 suicides in 2014.
    • Firearms account for almost 50% of all suicides.
    • The rate of suicide is highest in middle age — white men in particular.
    https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

    As it turns out, 2/3 of the deaths from firearms are due to suicide. That isn't a gun problem. That is a quality of life problem.
     
  18. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,985
    Other than them settin a good example... i only received 1 specific female relationship advice an it was from dad... an it was when i was plannin on gettin married... an he said... dont ever go any place that you woudnt take you'r wife.!!!
    Other than that i was always on my own... an from the get-go i knew i was the one who woud be responsible for how i behaved on dates an as it turned out i did a dam good job

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    It sounds like from early on you might have been talked into doin what other people thout best insted of learnin from first hand experiences... so you must feel like a kid in a candy shop finally doin what you thank is best for you.!!!
     
  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    Indeed. The real tragedy here, of course, is that we sold it to ourselves.
     
  20. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,253
    I think it's perfectly natural to feel this, a biological urge. Dwelling on it in an unhealthy way would not be a good idea, but to have those types of thoughts, they're normal.
     
  21. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,828
    I think it's normal for a man to have sexual attraction for a woman. I also think it's normal for him to exercise his imagination in said circumstance.
     
  22. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    Let us stop to consider the desire for sex by women from a woman's perspective. How do societal morays aid or interfere with the then appropriate action?
     
  23. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    957
    The changing gender roles seem to be a contributor. For example, it was once considered inappropriate for a woman to deny her husband sex. Now it is entirely normal. If a woman is completely insensitive to the needs of her husband, there is nothing that can be done except get divorced. And of course that often means putting yourself through years of hell and breaking up the family. I see little to no commitment from a large percentage of women. They let themselves go, get a big attitude, and expect to be loved and appreciated for who they are while treating their husbands like slaves who have no need for a life. This is one reason I enjoy the company of young women. They don't come with the attitude problems. And they know and accept that men need sex, without judging.

    The expectations of men have only increased but we got NOTHING in return. We are supposed to work till we drop dead... just make sure there is a good life insurance policy before you go.

    If you read up on why so many men my age are killing themselves, the changing gender roles are often cited as one reason. I would put my stamp on that. But more than that, I would also blame the hyper exaggerate female empowerment crap. In my experience, it is just used as an excuse to be selfish and inconsiderate... if not intolerable!

    How does this all tie into the original question? OF COURSE it is normal to think about sex when you see a beautiful woman. But how many men have been berated and harassed, shamed and threatened endlessly for being normal? Most I dare say at least from time to time. The real shame is that a man would have to ask this question.

    How bad is the problem. When you say 30,000 people died from firearms in the US, everyone is shocked and horrified. But when you say 2/3 of those are suicides and more than not, middle-aged men, all of the shock and horror evaporates. Everyone shrugs their shoulders and ignores it. Why? Because men are considered expendable. How many people are outraged by this? None that I can see. But they will get on the bandwagon and get all worked up for banning firearms, rather than addressing the root of the problem.
     
    Last edited: Aug 13, 2016

Share This Page