- Just as a businessman can choose, by their own free will, to set a price in a way that conflicts with the law of supply and demand, in the same way an adult male can, by their own free will, reject masculinity (or an adult female can, by their own free will, reject femininity). However, such people quickly make themselves irrelevant to the analysis—and that’s the point to be made here. That is, such people quickly select themselves out of relevance: To succeed on the market, businesses must by and large set their prices in accordance with the law of supply and demand. Analogously, to succeed on the “sexual market,” if I may use that term, men and women must by and large be masculine (if a man) or feminine (if a woman). The economic law of supply and demand, then, along with the “sexual law of masculinity and femininity,” then, aren’t, like in physics, thoroughgoingly deterministic laws. They’re laws about what you must do in order to win (e.g., in the game of the market, in the game of the “sexual market”). The quasi-determinism comes in because the losers disappear from the analysis. It looks, at least when looking through a very abstract lens, like businesses must follow economic law, like a planet orbiting the sun must follow physical law, but actually it’s just that the non-economic-law-obeying businesses quickly disappear from the market. There’s something of evolutionary logic here: The winners are, let’s say, the persisters.
- One of the key conclusions, perhaps, is that we’re more free to do what we want on the micro level than on the macro level.
- There’s also the question of how to set the preconditions for the flourishing of the market. Analogously, perhaps, it may be worth asking what the preconditions are for the flourishing of the “sexual market.” What gets in the way of a healthy economy? A healthy “sexual economy”?
- The game of sex rewards masculinity in men, rewards femininity in women, punishes femininity in men, and punishes masculinity in women. Analogously, the game of the market…
- Many people in feminism and social justice argue that “just having a penis” doesn’t mean that you’ll be a certain way personality-wise, and “just having a vagina” doesn’t mean that you’ll be a certain different way personality-wise, as if it’s trivial to you as a person what genitalia you just so happen to have. But “just having a penis” means, among other things, that the sex is over, and your sexual partner is potentially disappointed, when you orgasm. As a result, men are incentivized, sexually, to train a kind of self-control that women aren’t incentivized to train. That air of self-control even manifests socially: Women look for men with that air to them, whether they know why or not.
- A society without a law against murder quickly becomes no society at all. Thus, it’s a “law” of society (evolutionarily speaking) that there must be a “law” against murder (legally speaking).
- It’s reasonable to use an object for your own self-interested purpose, for the object has no such purposes of its own. Furthermore, objects aren’t free to do anything other than mindless obey physical law. Thus, for a man to “objectify” a woman—and here I hope to give a documented definition of this term—is for the man to use the woman for his own self-interested purpose, as if she’s an object with no such purposes of her own, and to control the woman so thoroughly as if to take away her free will, as if to make her mindlessly obey. Built atop the metaphorical substructure of English is the term “objectify” (as in, e.g., “to objectify a woman,” “the objectification of women”).
- The “laws of physics” are naturally thought of as exceptionless, for objects have no will of their own; they have no choice but to mindlessly obey. The “laws of economics,” however, along with the “laws of attraction and sex,” are naturally thought of as having exceptions. But there must of course be plenty of free-will-challenging regularities to be found in human action and the human mind.
- What’s universal about what women find attractive? For example, is it possible, psychologically speaking, for a woman to not lose attraction if focusing all of her attention on the fact that her hand is bigger than her husband’s hand? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean that a woman can’t just systematically avoid focusing on that fact. There’s no straightforward determinism in attraction because the woman (or man) can choose to ignore some aspects; what’s focused on, rather than what’s actually there, is what determines attraction.
- A man may be free to marry under his potential and even be sexually satisfied, but he may not be free to do so without training a kind of selective focus that bleeds over into the rest of his life.
- Even two people with a very high level of attraction for each other won’t necessarily follow through sexually, for it’s possible that one or both of them will override their feeling(s) with willpower.
Attraction and sex, continued
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