The Short Version

In her column that I wrote about the other day, Gail Collins said, “Jessica Valenti… worries that in the real world, young men are spending so much time watching pornography on the Internet that they will never be satisfied with normal women and normal relationships.” That line has come up in my brain several times since, and the reason, I think, is that the idea of “normal” seems problematic when it comes to female/male relationships among humans.

Ms Valenti is probably not lamenting the loss of the “normal” relationship of 100 years ago in this country, nor is she promoting the idea of normal that still prevails in large parts of the world: “me Tarzan, you Jane.” Whatever her own notion of normal is, it is apparently different from what she sees as an emerging trend: men either comparing women to porn stars physically, or wanting nothing more or less in a relationship than the “wham, bam, thank you, mam” of the pornographic kind. “Oh the times, they are a changin’,” and this change is not to her liking. ( I seem to be writing in quotations, today.)

Some of my own observations were recently written in “Healthful Ejaculation,” and since I don’t consider myself “normal” in any conventional sense, I think I’ll offer a few more, just for comparison with what you may imagine Ms Valenti’s are.

A little personal history, for perspective: (You might not want the kids reading this over your shoulder.) I had a brief affair with a Berkeley feminist, 25+ years ago, and once she called and invited me over, telling me later that I was her 40th birthday present to herself, (more on that later). In post-coital, joint-smoking conversation she said, “I know it’s chauvinistic to say, but you’ve developed your feminine side more than most men.”

Well of course, I haven’t developed my feminine side; it was developed by the life that was given to me, which is, of course, a long story.

A shorter story: I was at the Sutro Bath House one night, at least as long ago as the birthday story, when I was most fortunate to have the company of an amazing woman. I had eaten a hit of acid earlier in the evening, and was smoking the usual pot, so I was a little spacier than usual—not as sharp as I might have liked for a woman of her caliber. We were talking after the action had quieted down a bit, and she said, “I intimidate most men.”

“Why’s that?” I said, “Because you’re a banker?”

“No,” she answered, “Because I like to fuck. Most women don’t like to fuck.”

She did seem to enjoy the actual in-and-out more than anyone I’d ever met, and I said, “Well, you’re right, at least in my experience.”

“Is that why you give such good head?” she asked.

“Maybe so, maybe so…” You can see how quick-witted I was in my “heightened” state. I don’t remember much after that, except that I asked for her phone number, which she declined. I doubt that I could have kept up her pace, anyway.

So in my experience, most women only get interested in sex about once a month, unless they are in the relationship-procurement state.  With guys, it seems to be a question of time: how long has it been since the last time; there seems to be some built-in clock… This is not science, folks, this is anecdotal information to stimulate cogitation.

In the small town in the South where I grew up in the 50’s, things were way different than they are now, and I had realized early on that women weren’t driven by the same kind of lust I was: a guy had to meet a lot of stringent requirements before that kind of activity was allowed, if ever. There was a time when I greatly resented that, and translated it to mean that my sexual apparatus was considered physically dirty and repulsive—in many cases, an accurate translation. It took years to understand that it wasn’t personal; that women had their own physiology and history to deal with, and none of it was anyone’s fault.

In the meantime, I learned a couple of strategies for coping with things as they were: I learned to talk, and I learned how to give good head. I learned to pay attention to people, to their reactions, in both the conversational and sexual realms. I learned how to make people feel comfortable, relaxed, and that if I gave them a pleasurable experience, they were grateful and wanted to reciprocate: ladies first, always. Whether they reciprocated or not was optional: I made it clear that it was enough that I made them feel good; that I enjoyed the sensuality for its own sake, which was true—another lesson I learned. That was the approach my life led me into—no credit taken, or blame.

So that’s how I got to be a birthday present more than once: give without expectations and you shall receive in the giving itself, and perhaps in other ways as well.

Gross over-generalizations follow: It is lamentable, from many points of view, that girls and boys are so different. Perhaps some of the differences would be lessened if we could eliminate professional sports somehow, but I’m afraid testosterone would assert itself some other way. Women are always going to want kids, and help raising them, unless their hormonal balances are altered.

Maybe that’s the solution to male/female compatibility: estrogen for the boys, testosterone for the girls. In the meantime, I think talking openly about our physiologically and culturally built-in tendencies can help.

One thing is certain: things will continue to evolve.

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Looks Normal To Me

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Once again, my blog-writing module has been activated by an article in the New York Times, this one called, “Warning: Habits May Be Good for You,” by Charles Duhigg. The main focus is on the way that  a benevolent woman, Val Curtis, enlisted the habit manipulation know-how of American businesses to change the hand-washing behavior of people in Africa so that fewer children would die of diarrhea. They developed an advertising campaign that worked by cuing the built-in disgust response to peoples’ use of the toilet, and offering soap as a way of alleviating that disgust. The campaign has been very successful, in contrast to earlier habit-changing efforts that failed to appreciate the way human brains work.

The article is worth reading just for the many examples of how companies have used their knowledge to manipulate consumer behavior—you might be surprised at how your own habits have been altered for the benefit of someone’s bottom line. But a little thinking about the information presented reveals much broader implications for understanding how we function in everyday life.

I have written and talked about how different modules (neural networks,) are activated as we move from one environment to another—from the bathroom, to the kitchen, to work, for example—but this article alerted me to the fact that as different facets of any given situation catch our attention, each one may cue a different module. The sight of the couch may cue chip-eating behavior, as the author mentions, and as our gaze wanders around any room, we may find our thoughts and desires shifting in response to each item or person.

I have suggested elsewhere how these cued responses can be put to use; that if the dieting module wants to gain ascendency over the gluttony module, it should subscribe to health newsletters and magazines when gluttony is quiescent, and leave them on the table to re-activate itself when gluttony would ordinarily be in control. I had not considered, until reading today’s article, that it could be equally productive to work from the opposite direction and look for cues in the environment that activate the gluttony module. Just the understanding that the desire for chips is cued by the couch, and that that cue may have been implanted by the commercial of a chip-making company, might be enough to begin defusing that cue.

I have also mentioned how some unnoticed cue may lead us into an “emotion cascade,” a la Minsky, so that we find ourselves caught up in sadness, or loneliness, etc., and how I have tried to become alert to the beginnings of such cascades before they build up strength. The very understanding that emotion cascades begin in the same way that all behavioral sequences do—in the brain’s reacting to some cue in the environment—may give us enough perspective to see them as arbitrary sequences rather than taking them for “the way things really are.”

Getting back to how the disgust module was used to instill hand-washing behavior, we might take occasion to ask how our own disgust module acquired the set of cues that activate it. Whatever we find repulsive, that response was bequeathed to us by some aspect of our history, and examination may reveal that we have been manipulated by forces we may have the option of repudiating, once we become aware of them.

What is true of repulsion is true of attraction: many such responses are acquired—desire for that car, that fashion, etc. Those that are not acquired from our experience are the  result of something as programmed as pheromones—arbitrary from a genetic rather than from an environmental point of view.

There are at least two important conclusions to be drawn: nothing is inherently sacred or holy, and everything is dependent on what has come before. Our desire to change, to improve ourselves, is not something we can take credit for. That, too, is part of our inheritance.

The understanding of the origin of cues for our behavior becomes a part of what we are, and helps to determine what we will become. Understanding begets change.

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Becoming What It Will Become

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