Biology forms Identity. Identity forms Culture. Culture forms Politics.

[johnlucas]

In a thread in the Feminists group about Amanda Todd who was internet stalked online then bullied by her classmates to her suicide, I got into a tangential discussion with LadyHawkAZ (it starts here).
We were debating the culture that led to Amanda flashing her breasts on a webcam chat (which brought out her stalker).

LadyHawkAZ referenced an article that talked about the mixed messages girls get about sexuality in this society.
The Proper Lady/Slut complex AKA Madonna/Whore complex.
"Keep chaste & pure but put out" to put it simply.
She touched on the fact the adult stalker blackmailed Amanda by threatening to expose the pics playing off of this complex so she could pose for him more.
And the fact that the illogical double standard of Lady/Slut was in play when those kids who bullied her leading to her suicide.

I was more concerned about the nuts & bolts of why a girl had such access to the internet without supervision & why the stalker wasn't exposed HIMSELF for making the threats.
While I recognized the reality of that double standard & think it's nonsense to put Scarlet Letters on girls for stuff like this, I didn't quite think it was all cultural that girls in puberty start showing off their sexuality.

I believed that even WITHOUT the Lady/Slut complex females in puberty would start practicing out their sexual allure because
Masculine is PROGRAMMED to be attracted to Feminine
and
Feminine is PROGRAMMED to be attracted to Masculine.
The biological imperative.

It was getting off topic from the point of the thread so LadyHawkAZ asked me to start a new thread to debate this point further.
And here we are.

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I believe that Biology determines Identity.
From that Identity come Cultures formed as certain traits are promoted & demoted based on the needs of that environment.
Those Cultures shape the Politics, the Life Views of the people in those societies.

I have a very strong theory on how women's sexuality became oppressed in so many cultures on Earth.

Male biology & Female biology have marked differences.
For instance, it influences our approaches to sex since males drop seed easily & can walk away...
...while females have to carry that seed for 9 months eventually having a hard time walking & a harder time "harvesting" that seed until a 'baby' crop is birthed.

Think of an Extinction Level Event where there are only 11 people left on Earth.
In the 1st scenario think of this group of people as 10 men & 1 woman.
In the 2nd scenario think of this group of people as 10 women & 1 man.
They have to repopulate the Earth with these 11 people.

1st scenario
The 1 woman has sex with the 10 men to make a baby.
Nine months later she has the baby & now there are 12 people on Planet Earth.
Maybe she has twins, triplets, quadruplets & so on.
If so there would be 13, 14, 15 people on Earth.

Minimum 1 extra human being every 9 months.

2nd scenario
The 1 man has sex with the 10 women to make a baby.
Nine months later the women each have their babies & now there are 21 people on Planet Earth.
Maybe they have twins, triplets, quadruplets & so on.
If so there would be 31, 41, 51 people on Earth.

Minimum 10 extra human beings every 9 months.

Look at how this pattern looks from both scenarios:
1st scenario (10 men, 1 woman): 11 ~ 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
2nd scenario (10 women, 1 man): 11 ~ 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, 91

This made men more expendable since they can drop sperm very easily to spark life.
They send men to wars & dangerous pursuits since the world doesn't need as many men to reboot life.
This made women more protected since carrying a baby to birth is very hard to spark life.
They say women & children first on ships since the world needs many women to reboot life.

When women are pregnant they are sitting ducks for predators.
They can't run. They can barely fight. And they're protecting precious cargo in their balloon bellies possibly making them clumsy in the runaway.
Men have nothing else to do when women are pregnant except help fend off the predators so that the next generation can be born.
I believe this is how the protector male identity/protected female identity came out.

Being a protector meant being a controller since you were controlling your environment for the protection of the female.
Conflation took place & then the protectors started controlling the women & not just at pregnancy time.
Before you know it all the former protectors were about was controlling the women not for the women's sake but simply for their function of delivering babies.
Now women have value only by proxy. Children were the valuable ones & women were just a means to an end.

The identity has become a culture.

But all this because of that root biological structure that says men shoot & go and women carry the load.

Each culture assigns different status & functions for all the varied types of the human design.
With the feuding nature of Order & Chaos, we have form thanks to the static-ness of Order but our forms shape very differently thanks to the randomness of Chaos.

There are tall people, short people, fat people, thin people, muscular people, curvy people, physically strong people, physically weak people, extroverted people, introverted people, athletic people, scholarly people, creative people, near-sighted people, far-sighted people, people with 20/20 vision, fast people, slow people, talkative people, quiet people, heterosexual people, homosexual people, bisexual people, try-sexual people, dark-skinned people, light-skinned people, curly-haired people, straight-haired people, no-haired people, all-haired people, & on & on & on...

The biology of each person shapes how they see the world.
Take a person who is 6' 7" who can look at the tops of everyone's heads & see people coming in crowd from far away.
Take a person who is 4' 10" who can't see past a crowd being stuck in the middle crowded watching elbows, knees, & other body parts to make sure they don't smash into him/her

Height alone shapes so much of your personality & how you interact with other people.
That 6' 7 person with long legs doesn't need to make quick steps because of his/her long legs giving him/her a long stride.
They move like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo covering lots of ground with a slow gait.
That 4' 10" person has short legs & has to walk fast just to be able to keep up with the crowd, to keep up with their friends.
They move like Speedy Gonzales with many quickly struck steps to make that fast gait.

Biology also shapes the mind & personality since the brain & the hormones that color it are physical parts of matter.
I have a better word for the designation LGBT.
Intersexed.

That's what they are. Just different variations on the spectrum of intersexed people.
In the womb gay/bi/trans people are formed when at particular times in the fetus' formations certain hormone sets wash over the developing brain.
Depending on what set of hormones wash over at what particular time, you get your spectrum of homosexual people, bisexual people, & transsexual people.

When they found out that homosexual men's brains were very similar to heterosexual women's brains...
...and homosexual women's brains were very similar to heterosexual men's brains...
I KNEW that was the answer.

It's basically the case of a female brain working through a male shell (body) or a male brain working through a female shell (body).
The male shell still gives off lots of testosterone so gay men still come out a little different than straight women.
The female shell still gives off lots of estrogen so gay women still come out a little different than straight men.
But basically it's just like we see it in the culture: a little woman in a man's body, a little man in a woman's body.

The only real difference between Gay/Lesbian, Bi, 'Trapped in the Wrong Body' Trans is the timing & intensity of the hormones washing the developing brain.
Gays are satisfied with their bodies being different than their brains. Bis got it mildly so they're half-gay for lack of better words.
Transsexuals want their bodies to match their brains.
And in the case of Chaz Bono we can see it can be fluid where a lesbian decides to become a transman.

Each culture decided to do something different with these mentally intersexed people.
Native American nations called these people Two-Spirit & accepted them as full-fledged members of society.
The Puritan-based American society treated these people as abominations & ostracized them from society.

For whatever reason these 2 cultures took different paths into assigning status to these human types.
Fear of a population's annihilation may have spurred on a culture of fervent reproduction & gays being drawn to the same physical sex would not reproduce. So they were selected to be weeded out since they didn't fit the 'make babies' mentality of that society.
In another culture gays not being tied down with familial obligations could help in the rearing of the children made by the babymakers. So they were selected to be accepted in since they could shape society at large for the good of all.

From these cultures came the political views that gays were monsters living in sin in one & that gays were helpful citizens in another.
In some cultures gays were pedestaled as Godly.
It all depends on what that culture promotes.

Biology changes (see the aging process) & that changes Identity.
Once Identities change the Culture changes.
Cultures can change & BE changed causing Politics to change.
But at the root of all these other things is Biology.

Our whole world is determined by those genes & those gene expressions.
We ARE fated. We have choices WITHIN that fate but we are fated.
And one of those fates is that Masculine & Feminine are like the (+) & (–) poles on magnets.
Programmed to attract the opposite.

Discuss all of this & I'll elaborate.
John Lucas

[LadyHawkAZ]

1. Thanks for moving this

First point:

I believe that Biology determines Identity.
From that Identity come Cultures formed as certain traits are promoted & demoted based on the needs of that environment.
Those Cultures shape the Politics, the Life Views of the people in those societies.

The main premise at the base of our cultural sexual identity- the monogamy model, the one-man one-woman, pair-bonding-for-life family unit- is a lie. It is directly contrary to our biology. Everything we know about humans- from the design of our bodies to our brain chemistry to the behavior of our nearest genetic neighbors- bears this out. So right off the bat we are living with both a cultural and (for most people) personal identity that is, at its core, in opposition to our biological design.

From that one poisoned well flow all the other problems surrounding our sexuality and influencing the other aspects of our lives- everything from infidelity and divorce, to jealousy and possessiveness and violence, to Cinderella myths and Fifty Shades of Grey, to wealth-hoarding and the diet industry. We live in a constant state of war between our biology and our cultural training- and biology tends to lose out. We are so disconnected from our own nature that a person who behaves the way a human is designed to gets diagnosed with "sex addiction" and "treated" for their "disorder", while another who claims his invisible friend is watching you masturbate at night and is coming to punish you for it gets tax-free status and a congregation. That's ass-backwards, but that's our culture and it's the result of biological suppression, not nature itself.

Your ELE scenario and the discussion that triggered it- the sexual behavior of pubescent girls, flirting, preening, competing with each other to attract men- are indeed hardwired behaviors, so I'll give you half a point. But the thing is, they are competitive behaviors hardwired for times of scarce resources. There is currently no shortage of humans to mate with, certainly not in Vancouver where this all took place, any more than Vancouver has a food or shelter shortage. In a society as mobile as ours, there's no real shortage, period- it's very easy to travel somewhere close by where the pool of potential mates is much larger. Given the large available selection and the modern ease of access to it, coupled with our natural desire to have lots of sex with as many people as possible, we should by rights be fucking like bunnies. As dystopias go, we should be looking a lot more like Huxley and a lot less like Orwell- if we were actually following our hardwired biological design.

So where's the problem? Something's triggering resource-scarcity behavior in a resource-rich world, and it isn't biology. Culture has arrested our sex drive in several different ways- the promotion of the highly unnatural monogamy model, the taboos surrounding masturbation, virginity-until-marriage, the 3-5 year legal gap between onset of puberty and age of sexual consent- and this is tricking our bodies into thinking there's a sex shortage out there. We are in stiff (sorry!) competition for that one mate we are allowed, while at the same time we are presented with what amounts to the Golden Corral endless buffet of available genitalia. Cognitive dissonance sets in and human beings go nuts. And this is where you get girls, who've been brainwashed into thinking their sexuality needs to be doled out in disconnected bits to the highest bidder, ganging up on another girl who was a "slut" and showed her boobs, then slept with one of "their" men. All are displaying natural behaviors, in a sense, but only one is displaying behavior that is appropriate to the environment.

So while the behavior does have a hardwired basis, it's not being naturally triggered. It's being set off by cultural influences designed to suppress human nature, while at the same time that human nature is being given unprecedented opportunities to run free. And we wind up a very confused culture, loaded with problems like Amanda Todd.

Which brings me to second point:

Male biology & Female biology have marked differences.
For instance, it influences our approaches to sex since males drop seed easily & can walk away...
...while females have to carry that seed for 9 months eventually having a hard time walking & a harder time "harvesting" that seed until a 'baby' crop is birthed.

Some differences, certainly, but the whole seed-and-protector vs. pregnancy-investment isn't sufficient to cause the cultural shift you describe. Societies that took/take a more communal view of sexuality, more in keeping with our ape nature, also took/take a communal view of both family protection and parental duties, and to better effect- since a group can do a lot better job than one person, the women were better treated and the children were better raised when paternity (and in some cases maternity) wasn't an issue and the whole group took part. I know I brought up the Mosuo the other day, and I have read about similar cultural practices having the same result. So I would tend to doubt that male-protector model as making very little sense in the scheme of things. If I were a pregnant woman out in the wild prehistoric savannah, I'd prefer a group of guys with spears protecting me and the kids to just one guy with one spear, and if I were a guy I sure as hell wouldn't want to be all alone out there with just a spear and the lions. Our biology makes us social monkeys as well as sexual ones, and a communal group where all this is shared (sex included) would make more sense. Has made more sense, actually- it's been done.

So what happened there- I don't know. I know the theory's been put forth that agriculture happened, and the resulting shift from community sharing to personal property happened. It sounds about right. Somewhere in there, some exhausted guy alone with a spear defending "his" property against the lions or wolves or whatever, away from the social group that humans are programmed to be part of, decides the people on his property are his property, too. On down the line this sinks to the level of religious coda, some God whispers to some guy who's been eating a new kind of mushroom some rules on how that dynamic is supposed to work, and human society goes to hell. It makes sense from my point of view.

I am going to leave off there for the night since I have other things to do and this is becoming tl;dr. I'll pick it up from there tomorrow.