Assholes get all the chicks

But you knew that.

Now science does too!

So,  how does this “dark triad” fit in with this blog?  Well, obviously the same sociopathic traits described in the article can, if dialed down a bit, be seen as the “bully” or “dominant” traits.  My formulation is that they are not just successful because these types are a hit with the ladies but because these types are usually a hit with the tribe and become leaders.  So basically add Power to the dark triad (which makes it a dark quartet i guess) and you get an unbeatable combination for reproductive success.

My question, since I am most interested in femdom, is what is the female complement to this formula in sociological and sociobiological terms?

Jaded twenty-somethings

A lot of people come to BDSM in middle age. This is usually a result of sexual exploration after becoming bored with a couple of decades of “vanilla” sex.  Because they are middle aged they are generally committed to marriage, children, career, etc.  These entanglements constrain their ability to explore alternative lifestyles deeply, especially when their spouse isn’t equally adventurous.

But things are different now.  For better or for worse the youth of today, entirely because of the Internet, are exposed to enormous quantities of all kinds of pornography.  As a result they are likely to become far more jaded far more quickly than any previous generation as they attempt to ape what they see portrayed on YouPorn.  They are also more sophisticated about sex as they examine direct portrayals of all varieties of human sexual behavior.

It is important to note that they will be learning these things at the peak of their sex drives.  Previous generations had much more limited information at that age.  In times past non-vanilla sexual practices existed mostly as vague rumor.

At the same time as all this is going on, the youth of today are also less judgemental and more open-minded  about things sexual (homosexuality, for example) than any previous generation.

Based on these facts it’s no great leap to imagine that this will lead to an efflorescence of advanced sexual behavior among people in their twenties, before they have children and even spouses.   And whenever we see advanced sexual exploration we see a lot of power exchange play (BDSM, D/s, etc.).

Will we start to see dorm dominatrixes in colleges across the land?  (“Dormination”?)

And isn’t it interesting that traditional, sexually naive bullying and hazing behavior in high school and college have so often taken the forms of non-consensual or semi-consensual BDSM?

Does this mean that bullying behavior in high school, which I’ve argued is a precursor to adult Dominance/submission behavior, will actually merge with an ever lowering age of BDSM awareness?

Q.E.D. Update #1: Large numbers of twenty-something men taking viagra to ensure performance.

Q.E.D. Update #2: Young person’s apparel merchant sells Hitachi Magic Wand “Ultimate” vibrator. (Hint: it’s not for sore muscles.)

More free to be You and me

(inspired by zesje!)

Post-feudal societies strongly discourage what I consider to be our genetic tendency to order ourselves in genetically inherited dominance roles.  Modernism has decided, probably for the best, to embrace the fiction that all are born equal, with equal potential to lead or follow.

But I find it extremely telling that in situations where people are less constrained by these ideas you see a flowering of dominance and submission to the point of caricature.

Exhibit A: Homosexuals, especially male homosexuals.  Once a homosexual “comes out” they exist in a kind of freer space than heterosexuals.  Society has no clear expectations of them.  Additionally they have lived at least part of their lives unnaturally constrained by society and therefore have less respect for its rules.

As a result they have created a wild array of cultural behaviors and models from leathermen to “bears”.  Many of those behaviors take the form of BDSM and Dominance and submission.

Exhibit B: The online  “game” Second Life.

Due mostly to easy anonymity and profound lack of precedent, an even denser profusion of sexual and cultural behaviors can be found on the Internet.  This is particularly true in the online social experiment known as Second Life where there is essentially no social friction, so people behave in any way that suits them.

To me this is like dropping iron filings around a magnet.  They are small so friction is negligible. They are free to align themselves into the magnetic lines of force which surround the magnet, making the invisible visible.  Dropping a few hundred thousand people into Second Life with no social constraints and no actual object to the game other than to find fun makes their deep, instinctive desires and behaviors visible as well.

So what do we find in this neo-primordial ooze?

It turns out that the “mature” areas in Second Life make the San Francisco Halloween Parade look like a Methodist Bake Sale.  Sex roles are entirely fluid and, in support of my point about the state of nature, there is an overwhelming amount of BDSM and Dominance/submission.  Total freedom of identity and behavior has quickly produced, among all the things it could have produced, the world’s biggest S & M party.

And, in further support of my theory, there are many more submissives than dominants.  (Even most of the Dom/mes are themselves “switches” with Dom/mes of their own.)

This makes sense because while a group can function well with a single leader and virtually infinite submissives, too many leaders will create internal strife and disharmony.

An advocate for the devil would say that this is all easily explained by the fact that the BDSM crowd is concentrated in SL because it’s so hard to follow their kinks in the real world.  A strong argument, but I say there is a prior question, the exploration of which is the whole point of this blog:

Why are there so many kinky Dominance/submission-oriented people in the first place?

And how many more would there be if society didn’t stigmatize it so much?

Sociobiology

(for Moralia, written from the cave)

I believe that humans are a species evolved from branches of the same bush that produced our closest genotypic relations, apes and chimpanzees.

We know that even higher mammals have a large number of impressively complex inborn “instincts” : behaviors that are pre-programmed by biology, not learned during childhood. A newborn horse, for example, can stand and walk within hours of birth, something that takes a human many carefully supervised months to learn.

It would be very strange if humans did not also evidence similar inborn traits, and indeed we do.

I believe that the urgent will to power is, like many other predilections, something we are born with. Similarly the desire to submit to those who assert and gain power is an equally powerful complementary trait. The dominant can never be truly happy unless they attain the power positions they seek over others. The submissive can never be truly happy unless they are explicitly and sometimes brutally subordinate to those who naturally desire power.

Why evolution has presented us with this situation is irrelevant but not uninteresting. Remember, our instinctual behaviors are much, much older than our higher-brain social and political beliefs, and are, ultimately, probably still more urgent.

The sexual fantasies of submissive heterosexual men, for example, generally involve emasculation by powerful women and cuckoldry by powerful men. Why would evolution preserve such traits which seemingly would quickly be eliminated from the gene pool?

My contention is that the “silverback” dominant males and their equivalents among the females cannot physically monopolize or entirely manage the breeding in a large social group. Individuals willing to train the young without producing most of them are required. As a result, the existence of a separate caste works well for the general population’s growth and maintenance.

This more complex system is so important to the overall success of a colony that I believe the subordinate caste of males and females have evolved to receive the same kind of overwhelming pleasure from their particular service and lowly position that the dominant castes receive from their high position and power.

And so the cycle continued until, frankly, only the last few centuries when the less natural but more ethical concept of the absolute equality of all humans was born and quickly propogated.

But it remains true that that utimate satisfaction and happiness, beyond that which modern ethics can supply, comes only from knowing your own place in the natural order, and explicitly occupying it.