A Lay Philosophy of Sex and Gender

You don't have to be an expert on every kind of alcoholic beverage to know that people who drive under the influence tend to cause accidents in which other people die.

And you don't have to be an expert on every kind of tobacco to understand that second-hand smoke is harmful to yourself. Nor do you have to have first-hand smoking experience to watch the effects of tobacco on your coworkers.

I personally can tell you a lot about that. It's one of the reasons I left the software industry. Watched too many companies get dragged to the ground because management and the board of directors had the engineers so focused on getting the job done that they failed to make sure that the job should even be done, much less that it was being done correctly. (Witness Bruce Schneier waxing eloquent on Crowdstrike.) 

And one of the tools engineers use to focus themselves on deadlines instead of safety is tobacco. Coffee is another. And pornography.

You don't have to experience every possible sexual position to understand that sexual position is not what sex is all about.

And you don't have to have sex with every person on the planet, or even just every attractive person you meet, to understand that quantity is not better than quality. Neither do you need to have sex with a whole lot of people to understand that carefully sculpted and painted-on beauty can hide some serious hideousness behind the endomorphin-induced haze.

And there is something about sex, drugs, and rock and roll that makes us too susceptible to society's demands about all sorts of things, just like they can be used to make employees too susceptible to managements demands.

Management and society aren't entirely evil, any more than they are entirely good. 

We can't really be happy if we can't defend ourselves, and we need to understand ourselves to defend ourselves. 

But being happy also requires us to be able to bring the good things we have out for the people around us, in both business and non-business relationships.

Sometimes it's easy to see a whole lot of trees and miss the forest.

I'm not an expert on sex like Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny. But I have observed people getting hung up on sex and gender for over half a century, and with so much public focus on the topic, I'm re-exploring my previous analysis and understanding of sex -- and of how it fits into the general puzzle of social relationships.

And I'm inviting you to come along for the ride.

(But nobody's going to pay me up-front to write this, so the chapters will tend to be rather intermittent, as I have time to write. It'll be a slow ride. Take it easy, as the song goes.)

 

A Lay Philosphy of Sex and Gender

Joel Matthew Rees

Japan, 2024

Copyright 2024, Joel Matthew Rees, all rights reserved.

1. What Is Sex, part 1
   

Did You Get to First Base?

Somebody on eXtwitter posted an assertion of traditional sexual morality.

Somebody else posted the old dodge, 

How are people supposed to know if they are sexually compatible?

(This particular instance was last fall, when I wrote this blog post too late to be sure I was ready to publish it and then forgot about it.)

My reply started with 

Two people who want to be sexually compatible will find a way to be sexually compatible.

The response proposed an analogy about batting cages.

If two people want to do batting practice with each other, they will head to the park with a bucket of balls and a couple of bats, not to the batting center.

But batting practice is a little different from sex. Batting practice doesn't make babies.

-- unless pitching is a metaphor pitching woo, I guess.

That metaphor about first base being holding hands or something, and a home run ...

Here's how it really stacks up:

Holding hands is a game of catch.

Kissing is batting practice.

Sex before marriage is a foul ball

Sex after marriage is first base.

Having babies is bringing a runner home. 

Getting those babies safely grown up is winning games.

It's not the only way to win games, but it is the usual way. 

And foul balls don't necessarily mean a lost game. They can be recovered from.

Yeah, this is taking a metaphor too far, but it needs to be said.

Penetrative sex is not going all the way. Neither is getting pregnant.

Going all the way for real is doing your best to get your kids safely grown up.

(In a certain religious context, grown-up would include safely into God's heaven, but that's another topic.)

(Posted without the wall and revising here.)

Spreading the Dis-ease

Let's say, just for argument, that I wanted to spread a disease among a certain population sexually. What would be the most effective method?

How about this --

(1) Make condoms and other prophylactic sex toys readily available to that population.　Claim that this is educational and preventative.

(2) Fail to fully explain their use, limits, and effects. 

(Slipping and cracking when used too long or too energetically? Pinpricks and other manufacturing defects? Human failure to use them in the emotional rush? Etc.? Why make them worry?)

(3) Encourage the members of that population to engage in a lot of casual sexual experimentation with random partners within that population. 

(4) ...

(You want to complain that I am calling condoms sex toys? Think about the various kinds of condoms you can get -- bumps, ridges, "natural shape", ....)

(Also published here.)

Why Covenants for Sexual Relationships?

What is marriage, but a pledge, a covenant of mutual loyalty, fidelity, and support?

Why should that be?

Sexual intimacy is the kind of intimacy specifically authorized by marriage.

Why does sexual intimacy require a covenant of mutual fidelity and support?

Sexual intimacy involves the exchange of micro-flora (fungi, yeasts, molds, etc.), micro-fauna (bacteria, etc.), small insect pests (cooties!), and gametes. Micro-flora, micro-fauna, and small insects that the body is not used to can cause drastic changes in health, including death. Gametes, of course, can cause drastic changes of health.

We think we have modern miracle medicines that overcome the health problems. But that medicines, themselves, tend to cause health problems. Too much of the strong antibiotics necessary to control syphilis, for instance, can cause the body to have serious adverse reactions. We should not want to deliberately put our bodies at that kind of risk.

I'll note unwanted pregnancies in passing here. Condoms slip, develop pinprick holes, and have manufacturing defects, etc. And it is really easy to forget them in the passion of the moment. And, no, abortions are not easy on the female body. This should be enough discussion of this question.

How do we avoid these kinds of dangers?

Simple. Limit the number of people we get that intimate with.

If no one ever had sex with any but one partner, there would be very few sexually transmitted diseases, and there would be zero chance of them being spread in epidemic numbers. No matter what your attitude about sex outside of marriage, this principle cannot be argued with.

This is part of the reason for mutual fidelity.

But mutual support?

What happens when one partner gets cooties because of a hygiene slip-up? Mutual support in this case is that the partner with cooties will go to the trouble of getting rid of his or her own bugs, and stick around to help the other partner get rid of the shared infestation.

When this kind of relationship is forced, one partner or both is likely to break the agreements, which allows for the spread of disease and other undesirable results. This is why love is the appropriate motivation for this kind of relationship, instead of greed or tradition or power relationships or such.

Especially instead of power relationships.

They say you can't rape the willing. They are wrong.

Mutual rape is still rape. It's about power, not love.

Now, I have spent a bit of words discussing physical intimacy.

Sex also involves emotional and mental intimacy. (Did I forget to say that up there? I guess I didn't want to get distracted.) 

Yeah, certain people do seem to feel more comfortable with anonymous sex. (Do I need to point out that that requires multiple partners?) I'm not going to try to discuss such here -- anything I could say about that is likely to be wrong in some cases, so it really would be a distraction.

Most people looking for sex are looking for that emotional and intellectual intimacy. That's the part that makes the release of the hormones in the brain complete. And that's what they don't get when they don't settle down with a single partner.

Sex without these promises tends to be done under power relationships. Think about this. 

You can't buy love. 

You can buy greed, lust, desire, attention, and all sorts of other things, but you can't buy love.

And you can't force love. Again, you can force what you can buy. You can even force loyalty, which you can't really safely buy. But you can't force love.

There is one exception to the rule about buying love. In some cases, loyalty can be a coin of exchange with which love can be bought, but that requires both partners to give the same coin. And then it's no longer forced, and no longer bought.

That's one reason why some people stay in abusive relationships -- hoping that loyalty will be returned, and the relationship be converted to a relationship of love.

Is it not apparent that the covenant of loyalty, fidelity, and mutual support should be up front, and unfeigned? That such pledges be respected by society instead of torn down?

(Posting this in my freedom blog, as well.)

Gender Rubrics in Sports

(This doesn't really need to be here. I've re-posted it in my free-is-not-free blog, and that's where edits will occur.)

A niece of mine posted an article about Lia Thomas, and it got me thinking about the knotty problem of gender again. 

I don't have an answer, but I do have questions that I don't see anyone asking, that I think might lead to viable solutions.

So that you know where I'm coming from, my sport of choice is dance, which, even though dance has recently been developed into a competitive sport, is not a competitive sport in the model of swimming, track and field, ball games, martial arts and such. 

Even though there are tournament-style competitions in dance now, complete with metrics and rubrics, dance remains naturally a sport where everyone can be a winner. Except in the more recently contrived competitions, competition is not for one unique crown, nor for the runner-up crowns. Natural competition in dance is more about finding someone interesting to yourself, to dance with for a while. Or about finding new ways to move from here to there, or to exercise your own body and keep it running.

Whoa. Wait. There's my entire post, already done in one paragraph.

Except that most people who find this rant somehow and start reading it will not see in that paragraph what is so obvious to me.

When you have disagreements like we have about Lia Thomas, it usually is indication that we need to go back and examine our basic assumptions. That's what I want to do, examine basic assumptions about sports and then come back to the question of how gender and sports should relate to each other.

So -- assumptions.

Of what use is sports?

Okay, of what use is dance?

The easy answers include getting rid of stress -- relaxation, physical exercise and training, possible opportunities for social interaction, and such. If talking about dramatic dance, it can also be useful for self-expression.

With sports, we get a similar list. Self-expression? Yes. Self-expression. Sports provides a sort-of legitimate outlet for aggression and glory-seeking, in a less violent and destructive venue than war. And the training, with the metrics and rubrics, provides a lab for research in health and nutrition. It's all beneficial, all to the good, right?

One of my great grandfathers was an educator. He left me a little saying that was pithy and colorful in late 19th-century American English. Essentially, he noted that we are generally careful when training horses, not to push them so hard as to cripple or injure them, or to be excessive in ways that leave the horses with bad habits, even if the horse seems willing. 

But we often fail to be so careful with our children. Especially if they seem to be willing.  

We all know the stories about the promising little-league pitcher who ruins his throwing arm winning that all-important game and never plays baseball again. About the high-school track star who collapses at the big meet and never runs in competition again. About the high-school football players who never learn to study and wash out in college, or the college football stars who ride their scholarship into the pros only to find that they are really only good enough for a year or two of pro and then have no way to earn a living.

These most recent Olympic Games, postponed until just after the crest of the pandemic. Why were we willing to let tradition push us to risk the athlete's health that way? It seems to have (mostly) worked out okay, but couldn't we have just skipped a cycle, moved the venues back four years? And the winter Olympics, with Russia complaining that the rules about drugs were unfair to them?

I say I don't have an answer, but I might have a suggestion.

In high-school and college sports, there was no national championship in the US for a long time. Common sense told us two or three things:

1. There are always schools without certain advantages that can never make it beyond district play;
   
   
2. At the state level, there are usually several teams that are top-level and would be evenly matched if they meet in the finals, but simple chance will eliminate enough that, maybe, only one makes it to the final game. And if two make it to the final game, it is often a matter of luck which one wins.
   
   
3. (Actually, this is the most important:) The emotional investment of the championship games often leads the athletes to take unnecessary risks, which every now and then result in life-changing injuries. And we thought it seemed unfair to put the athletes at such increased risk of career-ending injury at the academic level.
   

Maybe we should either abolish national and international competition, or somehow create an environment in which even the national and international level can be played in the (intended) spirit of friendlies at the local level?

What is it that moves us to invest so much in championships?

Hmm. Sponsorships. Advertising campaigns. Market wars.

What is it that moves us as corporations to invest so much in winning the market wars? (... competition which has become a modern substitute for more literal warfare, less damaging physically, maybe, but no less emotionally/mentally)?

Excessive market warfare results in products that don't sell well being removed from the market. Many of those lost products were products that individuals wanted or even needed. And what remains does not match those needs or wants anywhere nearly as well.

Market competition, when it is done right, should result in good match between product and consumer. But our current markets are barely any better than controlled markets at anything but maybe volume. Sure, we do see some increase (finally) in the production of microbrews and such, but the race to the bottom that defines the market wars we currently engage in often drag any niche products that become sustainably popular down with them.

Back to sports.

It seems to me that we need to get rid of the idea that there can be only one winner. There never really is, except in some temporary and impractical sense.

I said I had no answers. This is not an answer, it's a sort-of a suggestion that just occurred to me now.

Looking at the metrics in swimming, speed within a style is the only metric. Well, there is water polo and such, and water ballet, but those are different.

Why?

What if swimming meets required each speed competitor to also compete in water polo or some similar team sport, and in water ballet or water gymnastics? And the overall scores weighted all the performances together? And we got rid of men's and women's divisions?

Hmm. Not workable exactly like that, but maybe there's something in there that might spark a solution.

...

No medals in single events. Medals for overall scores, maybe four gold for the top four, four silver for the next four, etc? Exact number depending on the number of athletes.

Are You Meeting with Acephobia? Do People Say You Must Be Asexual? Unemotional?

(Reposted, edited, in my main blog: https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2022/02/are-you-meeting-acephobia-do-people-say.html. )

(This is for people that get questioned over their lack of interest in sex.)

Don't ever believe that you don't have human emotions. Whoever tells you that is either lying for their own power or gain, or trying to use metalanguage you don't use to say something else. 

You can hope for their sake it's the latter, but that's not your problem. Just don't believe them.

The whole social conversation about sex is so skewed that you really can't tell what people are trying to say any more. People claim to be gay or lesbian or even bi-sexual, and yet they claim not to be practicing -- not sexually active. Other people claim to be defending the rights of the homosexually inclined, but they themselves are practicing bi-sexual. 

Machiavelli and de Sade were not the first, nor were they the last, to assign for more, and less, meaning to sex and gender than can be justified.

It can be sort of understandable sometimes. For too many people, the hormonal flux is the only thing they've experienced that makes them feel good about either themselves or life. Maybe nobody ever hugged them except to try to force them to feel better. Or maybe words of praise were always attached to conditions. Or some other such. So many ways we pervert natural affection.So many ways we pervert love.

Anyway, human emotion has lots of colors. 

(And the rainbow flag is now being used to mute those, even.)

If LGBQTetc. Is Real, Everyone is LGBQTetc.

(This is another rant that doesn't really work on several levels.) 

[JMR202412171406: On the other hand, it seems to work better than not talking about it.]

I have no right to deny anyone the right to choose their own labels. Nor, really, do i want to.

But when you choose your labels for yourself, be aware that you do not need to limit yourself to the labels society offers.

About twenty-two years ago, I read some in a blog by a guy who was the maintainer of a certain program that was considered by some to be essential in working with the SGML family mark-up languages. Or maybe it was XML. I don't remember the name of the program now, nor do I remember the name of the developer. Neither seem to come up in web searches any more. 

I guess the web is just too big now. (I can't even find my own blogs by simple web search on my name any more.)

He identified as gay, and had several posts that defended his identification and, as he thought, the existence of the gay community. 

In one particular post, he posited that there was no such thing as a true lesbian. The short version of his theory was that, at any particular time, one of the partners would be taking the role of butch. Gay males, on the other hand, would have no similar requirement.

I thought, at the time, of taking screen shots of the post, but I figured no one would believe I hadn't created them in the GIMP (i. e. Photoshopped them), anyway.

I rather fancy that he realized what he was saying, and took the post down.

At the risk of drawing the ire of all sorts of people, as near as I can tell, this is the substance underlying LGBQTetc.: identification based on mistaken concepts of sex, gender, and the nature of human relationships.

When I was in elementary school, somewhere around 4th or 5th grade, there was a group of budding jocks in the locker who would show each other what they had in their shorts and tease each other about it. They generally tried to get the rest of the guys to join in, teasing, or even bullying those who would not with crude comments about the supposed size or shape being the cause of their reticence.

I was tall enough and heavy enough that they mostly left me out of it, although some of the alpha-wannabees would complain that I didn't join in the fun.

What kind of is never said about this is that it is fun -- in a sense. Showing and seeing stimulates certain brain activities, which respond in blood rush to the gonads, which is perceived as pleasant, and cyclically reinforcing. Mix into that the sense of camaraderie when being part of a group engaged in edge behavior, and you get addictions. 

The alpha wannabees were the ones who would then seek out the most vulnerable of the other boys after school and badger them for sexual favors.

That's one of the lenses that I still view the whole question through.

Anyone who lets their own self-image get tangled up in the way they react to various hormones is going to get turned on by seeing flesh, whether of the same gender or the opposite gender.

You do filter your reactions by your subconscious perceptions of what is acceptable and desirable.

But turn-on is turn-on.

If turn-on is the purpose of relationships, we are all lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender. The only question is whether we are in the closet or not.

There is a side question of physical expression of gender. 

No two people are alike, and it would be really difficult to specify what is "full sexual differentiation". 

Large breasts do not a woman make. Breast size does not indicate ability to lactate. Penis size does not correlate with sperm count. Etc.

So the term sexual differentiation has (probably rightly) become deprecated. (Yeah, I used to use it, too.)

Some men will not be able to produce a high enough count of viable sperm count to induce conception. 

Some women do not produce egg cells, or will produce egg cells that are not viable. 

This does not make them less than others. It's just one more way to be different.

Nature makes a variety of people for many reasons. 

(For those who believe in God or such, by the evidence we have before us, God makes us all different.)

One person will be good at raising wheat. One will be good at raising oats. One will be good at adding numbers. One will be good at manipulating abstract symbols.

Even within a "specialty" there will be specialties.

With all the different things people are good at, the necessary jobs and the important jobs are much more likely to get done. 

Put in the negative, if we were all the same, we would all have to live thousands of years to be sure there would be enough people with enough skills to handle every necessary job, because we would all have to pick up every specialized skill. 

... because we would all have to learn everything before we could learn anything -- before we could live.

One thing that cannot be forgotten is that specialization changes over time. Someone who is pretty good at raising grain may change paths and learn how to raise cattle or manipulate abstract symbols instead of just continuing to get better at raising grain. 

Sexual function is similar. So is sexual attraction. Both change. That is, I've seen plenty of blog posts by people who at one point identified as gay or lesbian, but later decided they were bi or even ace. 

Variety is good. Since we are all different, there is a greater chance for each individual to find someone, compatible or otherwise, with whom they can maintain a relationship, perhaps for the purpose of raising a family, perhaps just for the purpose of having companionship.

(It is a gross evil to box people up in stereotypes, and we, as a society, as a world, have been doing that since millennia before Machiavelli and de Sade.)

We separate children as boys and girls at birth for reasons that are and are not reasonable.

But when we find it difficult to assign gender, instead of just letting the assignment wait -- or, what may be better, just deciding we as a society don't need to assign gender -- we have doctors who believe they can "correct" nature's "mistakes". 

At very minimum, we should be much slower in our attempts to correct nature.

If we, as a society, were not so insistent on enforcing a binary classification between male and female from birth, rainbow and gay could go back to just being about art and about enjoying being alive.